Quantum · Computing & Physics — Four Fingers News

Quantum Computing & Physics Monitor

The race to make the universe compute for us · Qubits, Q-Day, and the end of encryption as we know it

1,121

PHYSICAL QUBITS

IBM Condor (best)

LOGICAL QUBITS

QuEra, peer-reviewed (Nature)

13,000x

QUANTUM ADVANTAGE

Google Willow

<4 yr

Q-DAY ESTIMATE

RSA-2048 at risk

$40B+

GLOBAL QC SPEND

2026 (gov + private, incl CHIPS $2B)

The Qubit Race

WHO’S BUILDING WHAT · THE HARDWARE SCOREBOARD NOBODY ASKED FOR BUT EVERYONE NEEDS

PLAYER	CHIP / SYSTEM	QUBITS	APPROACH	STATUS	WHAT IT MEANS
USGoogle	Willow	105	Superconducting	ADVANTAGE PROVEN	First “below threshold” error correction — the latest data shows logical errors falling ~2.14× per step up in code size, the scaling theorists predicted. Completed in minutes what would take classical supercomputers billions of years. The benchmark is absurd but the physics is real.
USIBM	Nighthawk (120q) / Condor (1,121q)	1,121	Superconducting	ADVANTAGE BY EOY	Committed $10B+ over five years on Jun 2 toward fault-tolerant machines by 2029; says partners demonstrate advantage in 2026. IBM has never met a roadmap it couldn’t revise, but $10B is a serious way to hold yourself to one.
USMicrosoft	Majorana 2 (Jun 2)	8 (topo)	Topological	PROTOTYPE	Majorana 2 unveiled Jun 2 — second-generation topological chip, still drawing both industry interest and demands for independent evidence. Magne (50 logical qubits) due early 2027. Microsoft is betting that everyone else is building qubits wrong.
USQuantinuum	H2	98 (physical) → 94 detected / 48 corrected	Trapped ion	BREAK-EVEN	Mar 2026: 48 error-corrected qubits from 98 physical qubits. Error correction now improves accuracy instead of hurting it. Filed for a Nasdaq IPO (QNT) May 11 on $30.9M of 2025 revenue; tied up with Synopsys May 20 to put quantum solvers into chip-design simulation.
CNUSTC / Origin	Jiuzhang 3 / Zuchongzhi 3	255 (photonic) / 105 (SC)	Photonic + SC	DUAL ADVANTAGE	China is the only country with quantum advantage on two separate hardware platforms. The papers are real. The implications for the encryption timeline are not comforting.
EUIQM / Pasqal	Various	~100	SC + Neutral atom	SCALING	Europe’s quantum flagship: €1B+ invested. Finland, France, Germany leading. Playing catch-up but with actual industrial applications in mind rather than just bragging rights.

The Q-Day Clock

WHEN QUANTUM BREAKS ENCRYPTION · THE TIMELINE KEEPS SHRINKING

~2030

ESTIMATED Q-DAY — WHEN RSA-2048 FALLS

Down from ~2040 estimate two years ago · Three papers in three months rewrote the math

RESOURCE ESTIMATES TO BREAK RSA-2048

2023 ESTIMATE20M physical qubits

2025 (GIDNEY)<1M physical qubits

2026 (ICEBERG/LDPC)<100K physical qubits

The number of qubits needed to crack modern encryption has dropped by an order of magnitude since May 2025. NIST says RSA-2048 is safe through 2030. NIST also deprecated it after 2030. Both of those sentences are load-bearing.

HARVEST NOW, DECRYPT LATER: State actors are already collecting encrypted traffic with plans to crack it once quantum catches up. If your data needs to stay secret past 2030, it is at risk today. NSA’s CNSA 2.0 mandates quantum-safe encryption for all national security systems by Jan 2027. Google’s internal deadline: 2029.

The Physics Wire

BREAKTHROUGHS · WEIRDNESS · THINGS THAT SHOULDN’T WORK BUT DO

Q-DAY Washington grades its own homework. GAO found that none of the 24 CFO Act agencies has fully put in place the three basics of a move to quantum-resistant cryptography — in-house expertise, an inventory of vulnerable systems, a test plan — and issued 89 recommendations to 23 of them. One agency disagreed with three. (GAO-27-108740, Oct 6.)
MONEY Berlin picks its atom builders. Germany’s research ministry chose planqc and the LOGIQC consortium, with Max Planck and LMU Munich, as the neutral-atom pair in a competition worth up to €640M across three hardware platforms. The goal is error-corrected machines by 2030; the first pass-fail gate is Mar 31, 2027. (Quantum Zeitgeist, Oct 5.)
Q-DAY The NSA sets the clock. New commercial national-security systems must support quantum-resistant algorithms from 2027, and legacy gear that can’t must go by 2030. “The quantum threat is an existential threat to the digital ecosystem,” says the agency’s Morgan Stern. Harvest-now, decrypt-later is the reason for the hurry. (NSA, Oct 1.)
MONEY Innsbruck wires up a quantum internet. The university and spin-off AQT will link three trapped-ion processors into two metropolitan networks joined by hundreds of kilometers of fiber, with €5.4M of the EU’s €47.5M Quantum Internet Alliance money. Europe’s answer to China’s trunk lines is still a prototype; this is what it looks like. (University of Innsbruck, Oct 1.)
SCIENCE The lattice builders get the Wolf. Immanuel Bloch of Munich and Jun Ye of JILA share the 2026 Wolf Prize in physics for controlling ultracold atoms — the optical-lattice and atomic-clock work underneath today’s neutral-atom computers. (Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Oct 2.)
SCIENCE Photons that match. Paderborn, Basel and Bochum physicists put quantum dots in a tuned optical cavity and raised the indistinguishability of their photon pairs from 60% to 90%. Photonic computers and quantum networks run on interference, and interference needs twins. (Physical Review Letters via The Quantum Insider, Oct 2.)
SCIENCE A qubit in liquid helium, on paper. Surrey and Northwestern physicists propose a qubit built on charge-neutral superfluid helium-3 and calculate error rates about 100 times below superconducting designs. It is modeling only; the prototype is the next step, and the claim lives or dies there. (npj Quantum Information, Oct 1.)
MONEY D-Wave lets customers rehearse the other machine. The annealing company opened a beta simulator of its dual-rail superconducting gate-model design, built around error detection, with BBVA and Jülich among the first users. Annealing paid the bills; this is the bet on what comes next. (SiliconANGLE, Oct 1.)

The Quantum Internet Race

SECURE COMMUNICATION INFRASTRUCTURE · WHO CAN TALK WITHOUT BEING HEARD

🇨🇳

China: 2,000km Beijing–Shanghai quantum trunk operational, 4,600km counting the space-ground network. Micius satellite demonstrated space-to-ground QKD between China and Europe. Quantum repeater breakthrough (Feb 2026) removes trusted relays. Leading the world in deployed quantum communications by a wide margin. The gap is not close.

🇪🇺

Europe: EuroQCI backbone under construction across multiple countries. EAGLE-1 satellite launched for orbit-to-ground QKD testing. €1B+ Quantum Flagship investment. Finland, France, Germany leading. Infrastructure-first approach — less flashy than China’s but building for interoperability.

🇺🇸

United States: DOE quantum network testbeds at national labs, and an Aug 21 free-space link that carried entangled photons 13 miles between Stony Brook and Brookhaven — a route that does not need trenches. Strong on research, still weak on deployment. NSA mandating post-quantum crypto by 2027, which is the “we might not win the hardware race so let’s win the math race” strategy. Pragmatic. Arguably correct.

A quantum internet doesn’t make the regular internet faster. It makes eavesdropping physically impossible. That’s a different kind of valuable.

Four Fingers note: Quantum computing coverage tends toward two poles: breathless hype (“it will change everything!”) and dismissive skepticism (“it’s always ten years away”). The reality in 2026 is more specific and more interesting than either. Error correction just crossed break-even. The encryption timeline just lurched forward. China has a functioning quantum network longer than the US interstate highway system. Now the lead labs are filing IPOs and governments are placing build orders. These are engineering milestones, not press releases. Whether you care because of the science, the security implications, or the $40B+ being spent, the receipts are here. We’re tracking them.

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