Technology should sit at the heart of Scotland's growth strategy, by Nick Freer

At the Scotland 2050 conference in Edinburgh this week, politicians and business leaders gathered to discuss the country's long-term future. Energy, housing, healthcare and economic growth all featured prominently. Yet one topic appeared notably underrepresented: technology.

That omission matters when you consider that today, 12 of the world’s 14 trillion-dollar companies are technology or technology infrastructure businesses. Whether artificial intelligence, cloud computing, semiconductors or digital platforms, technology has become one of the primary drivers of economic growth.

For a country seeking to improve productivity, attract investment and create high-value jobs, the question is no longer whether technology should be part of the economic conversation. It is whether it sits at its centre.

The next frontier is likely to be quantum computing. While still in its early stages, the technology promises to tackle problems beyond the reach of even today's most powerful supercomputers, with applications ranging from drug discovery and energy systems to advanced manufacturing and logistics.

Alongside artificial intelligence, quantum computing is set to become the defining technology of the coming decades. Jensen Huang, chief executive of NVIDIA, has suggested that "very useful" quantum computing may emerge within the next twenty years. If so, the economic opportunities created will be seismic.

Scotland has growing credentials in quantum. Last year saw the launch of the Quantum Networks Hub, led by Heriot-Watt University and supported by £42 million of UK research funding. Its objective is to develop the technologies, protocols and standards underpinning secure and scalable quantum communications networks.

However, the longer-term ambition is not simply academic excellence. It is to translate research into commercial success: new companies, new industries and new sources of economic growth.

That distinction is important. Research and development generate knowledge. Prosperity comes when that knowledge is commercialised, scaled and anchored locally. Scotland’s world-class universities have delivered breakthrough innovations for generations. The greater challenge has often been converting them into globally significant companies.

While it is important to look ahead to a future quantum era, there remains a more immediate challenge. Scottish technology companies need access to the computing infrastructure in order to innovate today.

Writing for this column recently, CoreWeave's vice-president of strategy, Ben Richardson, argued that delays in providing sufficient cloud computing capacity risk slowing innovation and pushing investment elsewhere. In the age of AI, access to compute is increasingly becoming a prerequisite for economic competitiveness.

No one can confidently predict what Scotland, or the wider world, will look like in 2050. But one conclusion already seems clear: the countries that prosper will not simply be those that anticipate technological change. They will be those that help create it.

Scotland's potential is already visible. This week, Edinburgh-based legal tech startup Wordsmith AI secured a $70 million Series B funding round, prompting inevitable comparisons with Skyscanner, still for many the benchmark for Scottish technology success.

But if Scotland wants to help shape the world come 2050, technology can never be a footnote.