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XPRIZE Quantum Applications

Google and the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) announced seven finalists in the XPRIZE Quantum Applications competition launched in 2024. The finalists will split a $1 million prize. They were selected from more than 130 teams’ proposals for quantum algorithms that may someday outperform classical computers and solve real-world problems.

An additional $4 million will be awarded in 2027, with $3 million of that going to the “grand prize winner.”

The team leaders of the finalists include:

• Caltech’s Garnet Chan. Targeting practical speedups in materials simulation, especially for semiconductor applications.

• András Gilyén at HUN-REN Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics. Simulating thermalization of finite- and low-temperature quantum systems to narrow candidate parameter spaces in next-generation materials.

• Phasecraft’s Toby Cubitt. Developing quantum chemistry models for faster, more reliable discovery of clean-energy materials.

• MIT’s Alexander Schmidhuber. Speeding up community detection over hypergraphs solutions to improve protein-protein interaction analysis and target therapeutics for polygenic diseases.

• Xanadu’s Juan Miguel Arrazola. Simulating the time-evolution of certain molecular processes to develop higher-performing organic solar cells.

• ETH Zurich’s Markus Reiher. Building hybrid quantum-classical chemistry models for large-scale biochemical applications and drug discovery.

• Rice University’s Jianqiang Li. Developing a new quantum algorithm for solving linear systems of equations in a range of applications.

Read the full announcement from Google.

“Finalist teams now move to Phase II of the competition, which is focused on performance assessments, including benchmarking against state-of-the-art classical methods, establishing real-world advantage, and detailed resource estimates of the computational cost and feasibility of deployment,” said Ryan Babbush, Director of Research, Quantum Algorithms and Applications at Google Quantum AI.

“We are excited about the results of the competition so far, and energized by recent progress in quantum computing applications development.”

A “Phase II wildcard round” will open in early 2026, allowing teams that were not selected as finalists to re-enter the competition.

Quantum Campus is edited by Bill Bell, a science writer and marketing consultant who has covered physics and high-performance computing for more than 25 years. Disclosure statement.