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Wide open race?

MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, in collaboration with Accenture, released a wide-ranging “Quantum Index Report” last week. Billing itself as a “comprehensive, data-driven assessment of the state of quantum technologies,” the report captured the global quantum R&D landscape across: patents, academic research, networking, processor benchmarking, venture funding, corporate communications, policy, workforce, education, and public opinion.

For its extensive processor benchmark, the report looked at more than 160 quantum processing units that are in the planning or prototyping stages or that are commercially available. It found about 25 manufacturers currently offering more than 40 types of quantum processor. Almost 80 manufacturers are in the field overall.

Superconducting products “dominate,” making up about 40 percent of commercially available QPUs. “However other modalities, such as photonics, trapped ions, and especially neutral atoms and electron spins, are gaining momentum; their share is expected to grow in the coming years,” the report said.

“Overall, quantum processing units are making impressive progress in performance, but they remain far from meeting the requirements for running large-scale commercial applications such as chemical simulations or cryptanalysis…Each platform presents a distinct set of strengths and limitations, and the race toward useful, scalable quantum computing remains wide open.”

The team’s benchmarking considered factors like qubit counts, fidelity, coherence, and gate speed — as well as the various modalities used to encode, manipulate, and read out quantum information.

Deeper performance metrics across modalities and platforms, rather than simple qubit count, also featured in their work. For example, to “determine the maximum length of a circuit for a QPU, an important metric is the comparison of the speed of executing a single gate to how accurate this gate is (fidelity). For real-life scenarios such as Shor’s Algorithm for decrypting information utilizing RSA2048, more than 1013 Logical Gates are required. Slow gate speeds at that size lead to calculation times of days or even months with some modalities.”

Authors also indexed future roadmaps and plans from manufacturers, projecting what platforms might emerge more frequently, what sort of performance and fidelity those platforms might see, and what countries are focusing on given approaches.

Government and venture funding that would drive development are featured, as well. “The quantum technology funding landscape has shown remarkable evolution and growth in recent years, consistently surpassing previous milestones. 2024 was a new high-water mark for the sector, although it is worth noting quantum represents less than one percent of total venture capital funding worldwide,” the report said.

Quantum-related companies announced more than $2.5 billion in private-sector investment in 2024 alone. They also exceeded $2.5 billion in 2022.

“While established powers such as the US continue to invest, other players such as Canada and the Netherlands show impressive commitment to the sector, indicating accelerated expansion strategies and commercialization success.”

The US federal government is spending $2.7 billion over five years through its National Quantum Initiative. Australia has announced more than $650 million (USD), Netherlands more than $700 million (USD), Canada more than $260 million (USD), the United Kingdom more than $3.4 billion (USD) over 10 years, and China an estimated $15 billion.

The full “Quantum Index Report” is available from MIT, as is the data used to develop its findings. All charts and images in this story are from the report authored by MIT and Accenture.

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.