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■ QUANTUM · COMPUTING & PHYSICS
Quantum Tracker
Q-Day clock, the lab scoreboard, the physics wire, the network race.
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
UPDATED: Jul 16, 2026
1,121
PHYSICAL QUBITS
IBM Condor (best)
94
LOGICAL QUBITS
Quantinuum (Mar 2026)
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 | 56 (physical) → 94 logical | 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
- HARDWARE A quantum computer that skips the fridge. QuiX Quantum delivered “Carina,” a universal photonic machine, to Germany’s DLR Quantum Computing Initiative — it runs at room temperature in standard data-center racks, trading the cryostat for light itself. (Jul 2026.)
- SCIENCE Quantum goes to work on fusion. IBM, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Cleveland Clinic reported on Jul 6 the first-known calculations of a fusion fuel material — nine configurations of FLiBe molten salt — on a quantum computer, a step toward breeding and extracting the tritium most fusion designs will run on. An early sign the machines can attack a hard materials problem, not just benchmark against classical ones. (Jul 6.)
- HARDWARE Fresh off the listing, IQM lands an order. The LUMI AI Factory in Kajaani, Finland, chose IQM’s Halocene H4 — a 150-qubit superconducting system — to wire directly into the LUMI supercomputer for hybrid classical-quantum runs by 2027, days after the company’s Nasdaq debut. Europe’s flagship now has a delivery date to hit. (Jul 8.)
- MARKET Europe’s first public quantum play. Finland’s IQM began trading on Nasdaq as IQMX on Jul 2 after merging with a listed shell — the first publicly traded European quantum-computing company, injecting about $233M in fresh capital. The continent’s hardware bet now marks to market daily. (Jul 2.)
- HARDWARE A cleaner link between matter and light. QuTech unveiled a nanophotonic interface built on diamond tin-vacancy color centers that couples a stationary solid-state qubit to a flying photon with high efficiency and low noise — easing one of the tightest bottlenecks in wiring quantum processors into networks. (Jun 2026.)
- HARDWARE IBM ships an error-detection add-on. IBM released Qiskit Paulice, open-source tooling that injects hardware-efficient “spacetime” Pauli checks into quantum circuits to catch noise on today’s NISQ chips; it has run on circuits up to 50 qubits. (Jun 29.)
- STATECRAFT Washington puts deadlines on Q-Day. Trump signed two executive orders backing the sector — one pressing for a “scientifically relevant” US quantum computer on a fixed timeline, the other ordering federal agencies onto post-quantum cryptography for sensitive data; quantum stocks jumped on the signing. (Jun 23.)
- HARDWARE Google claims a verifiable quantum advantage. Google says its “Quantum Echoes” run on the Willow chip executed an out-of-time-order algorithm about 13,000x faster than a classical supercomputer — and, unlike earlier advantage claims, one another quantum machine can independently check. (Jun 2026.)
- DISPUTE Microsoft’s topological claim challenged again. A new critique in Nature reopens questions about the Majorana evidence underpinning Microsoft’s 2029 timeline — the second time in a year the company’s topological-qubit breakthrough has drawn a formal scientific challenge. (Jun 24.)
- HARDWARE A fault-tolerant run with zero logical errors. AIX Global reported an eight-week campaign on cloud-accessible IBM Heron processors that ran surface-code error correction across 45,000 circuits with no detected logical errors; days earlier IBM said it is using AI to hunt for better error-correction codes. (Jun 13–15.)
- STATECRAFT France buys the first state-owned quantum computer. Through its France 2030 plan, the CEA is acquiring an 18-cat-qubit machine from Alice & Bob for the TGCC supercomputing center — the first time a government has bought, rather than rented, a quantum computer outright. (Jun 2026.)
- SOFTWARE IBM ships a tool to check the quantum work on a laptop. IBM Quantum released ffsim, an open-source library that simulates fermionic circuits on ordinary workstations by exploiting their symmetries — the unglamorous tooling that lets researchers verify large circuits without a quantum computer. (Jun 12.)
- HARDWARE Error-corrected qubits, now peer-reviewed. Quantinuum’s demonstration of logical qubits beating their physical counterparts by a factor of 800 — four logical qubits from 30 physical ones — landed in Nature this month, moving the result from press release to literature. (Jun 2026.)
- HARDWARE Italy switches on a neutral-atom machine. Pasqal’s SOL — a 140-qubit Orion QPU — went live at the CINECA supercomputing center, wired into the Leonardo supercomputer for hybrid classical-quantum runs. Sovereign quantum, now with a Mediterranean accent. (Jun 2026.)
- STATECRAFT Canberra writes sovereign money in. Silicon Quantum Computing took A$40M from Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund to scale its atomic-precision silicon line — another government deciding qubits are infrastructure, not a lab line item. (Jun 2026.)
- MARKET Europe writes the week’s checks. Four quantum companies raised $961M in seven days, led by Oxford Quantum Circuits’ $350M Series C — the largest private round in European quantum yet. The capital is arriving faster than the physics settles. (Jun 10.)
- HARDWARE IQM pitches a cheaper road to error correction. The Finnish superconducting outfit’s “barbell codes” — a six-qubit star lattice with near-local couplers — claims lower logical error rates with far fewer physical qubits than surface codes. If it holds up, the overhead math everyone budgets on just moved. (Jun 9.)
- STATECRAFT Abu Dhabi wants its own machine. The UAE’s Technology Innovation Institute launched a program to build the country’s first quantum computer — the Gulf treating qubits the way it treats LNG trains: sovereign infrastructure, not a lab line item. (Jun 9.)
- HARDWARE IBM clears a fault-tolerance milestone early. The decoder that catches and fixes quantum errors now runs 10x faster on ordinary chips — a year ahead of IBM’s own roadmap, and one of the dull-sounding engineering wins that actually gate a useful machine. (Jun 6.)
- MARKET Quantinuum’s first post-IPO deal is industrial. The newly public trapped-ion maker tied up with Mitsubishi Electric to push quantum solvers into computer-aided engineering — fluid dynamics, electromagnetics — the kind of paying customer a $60 listing has to keep finding. (Jun 6.)
- HARDWARE Atom Computing closes the error-correction loop. First continuous, multi-round error correction on a neutral-atom machine — a toric-code demo that moves a third qubit platform, after superconductors and trapped ions, into the corrected era. (Jun 3.)
- MARKET Quantinuum is public. QNT listed on Nasdaq Thursday — 28M Class A shares priced at $60 — the first pure-play hardware IPO. The 2029 roadmaps now get marked to market daily. (Jun 4.)
- MARKET Quobly raises €115M. The Grenoble silicon-spin outfit landed a Series A to industrialize qubits made on standard CMOS chip lines — Europe’s bet that the winning qubit comes off an existing fab. (Jun 3.)
- SOFTWARE PsiQuantum opens its Construct suite. Public access to the company’s fault-tolerant compiler stack — circuit design and resource analysis for utility-scale algorithms — before its photonic hardware exists at that scale. The toolchain ships first. (Jun 3.)
- MARKET IBM puts $10B behind the roadmap. A five-year commitment announced Tuesday — R&D, scale-up, partnerships — aimed at large-scale fault-tolerant machines by 2029, plus Anderon, a new pure-play quantum wafer foundry seeded with $1B. IBM says partners will show quantum advantage this year. The number is the message: this is now an industrial buildout. (Jun 2.)
- HARDWARE Microsoft unveils Majorana 2. The follow-up to its topological chip landed Tuesday, doubling down on the bet that everyone else is building qubits wrong — while parts of the physics community still press for independent evidence the Majorana modes are real. (Jun 2.)
- PHYSICS Stanford entangles quantum states at room temperature. A new device uses twisted light to entangle photons and electrons without deep cryogenic cooling — attacking one of the field’s biggest cost-and-size hurdles and pointing toward smaller, cheaper systems. (May 2026.)
- INDUSTRY Quantinuum points qubits at oil. A new tie-up with bp aims quantum solvers at seismic imaging, days after a Synopsys deal folded them into chip design. The hardware lead is being sold as a tool before it is finished as a machine. (May 2026.)
- COMPUTE Energy Dept. shops for 150 logical qubits. The DOE issued a request for information seeking a fault-tolerant machine of 150–250 logical qubits sited at a national lab by 2028, dangling non-recurring engineering funds to whoever can build it. Washington is buying capability rather than waiting for it. (May 2026.)
- COMPUTE JUPITER simulates 50 qubits. The Jülich Supercomputing Centre, with NVIDIA, fully simulated a universal 50-qubit quantum computer — a new world record, past the 48-qubit mark Jülich itself set in 2019. Classical hardware is still chasing the thing quantum hardware is trying to become. (May 2026.)
- PHYSICS Instant detection of “W states.” Researchers in Japan built a way to identify elusive three-particle “W” entangled states on the spot — a building block for quantum teleportation, secure communication, and more robust computing. (May 2026.)
- COMPUTE Largest quantum protein simulation yet. Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM modeled a protein-ligand complex spanning 12,635 atoms — a 210x accuracy gain over the prior state of the art, and the biggest biologically meaningful molecule run on quantum hardware. IBM separately marked ten years of cloud-accessible quantum machines. (May 2026.)
The Quantum Internet Race
SECURE COMMUNICATION INFRASTRUCTURE · WHO CAN TALK WITHOUT BEING HEARD
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🇪🇺
🇺🇸
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 $38B being spent, the receipts are here. We’re tracking them.