Altman Solon is the largest global telecommunications, media, and technology consulting firm. In this insight, we share key quantum computing takeaways from IEEE Quantum Week.
Combining opportunity and pragmatism, IEEE Quantum Week 2025 held in Albuquerque, U.S., provided attendees with fresh perspectives on progress in quantum computing (QC). While quantum supremacy was again in the spotlight, along with the heightened threat of an impending "Q-Day," where a hypothetical quantum computer breaks modern encryption, there was also a focus on ways to evaluate and apply current QC technology for business results.
Six major themes stood out from the event. Some confirmed our previous findings on quantum computing, while others brought new perspectives.
While chips with one million qubits could enable quantum supremacy in multiple domains, the technical challenges remain significant, with expectations of timelines that could stretch out to as long as 10 years. Instead, companies like IBM, Quantinuum, IonQ, and QuEra presented roadmaps at IEEE Quantum Week 2025 for building quantum processing units (QPUs) with 10,000 qubits within three to five years. As this will open the door to commercial-grade quantum computing, players should now start or extend their exploration of partnerships, associated development, and investment.
Quantum computing’s immense potential hinges on finding solutions to manage its sensitivity and lower its error rate. Enterprises in QC now seek to combine advances in physics, manufacturing, coding, and error correction techniques to lower error rates to a range between one ten-thousandth and one millionth. Exact routes forward will depend on objectives and timeframes. For example, surface codes for error correction offer possibilities of fault-tolerance in the short term, whereas low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes promise greater efficiency in the long term.
Quantum processing units have often been publicized as a radically different form of computing. However, most QC industry players at the event were now working to integrate QPUs tightly in today’s high-performance computing. By using QPUs as a new class of accelerator alongside CPUs and GPUs, chances improve for achieving interconnected and distributed QC faster, integrated tightly into HPC environments. Nvidia, HPE, and Cisco are among the mainstream players now active in this area. Nvidia's venture capital arm, NVentures, has been particularly active in QC startup investments of late. This hybrid approach will open new possibilities for neo clouds and data center system suppliers who will seek possible QPUs to add to their offerings.
According to several presenters at IEEE Quantum Week 2025, quantum algorithms are already as effective as classical ones for specific use cases related to optimization or searching large sets in chemistry, biomedical sciences, and finance. The quantum advantage will come as the qubit count per QC system grows. Additionally, quantum algorithms appear to offer enhanced performance compared to classical ones for estimating probabilities with smaller sample sizes. This could be relevant for finetuning large language models (LLMs). QC could not only help overcome the AI peak data challenge but could also considerably accelerate AI model training in terms of accuracy of answers. In return, AI can help boost QC stability, scalability, and usability. Given the popularity of AI, this could become a significant and lucrative use case for quantum computing.
Two companies stood out at the event with an impressive roadmap toward a 1 million qubit QPU: PsiQuantum, which had been silent for nearly two years, and Photonic. If they succeed, they will overtake rivals and could become prime targets for acquisition by hyperscalers. Their roadmaps have a clear impact on the outlook for “Q-day” when QC will be able to break today’s RSA encryption. First, they will have to resolve issues of error correction and fault tolerance for scalability. On the other hand, PsiQuantum was one of the two companies (the other being Microsoft) to advance, in early 2025, to the next stage of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) tests of the true utility of QC approaches (see below).
DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), aiming to include more QC projects for evaluation, is ongoing. QBI is designed to evaluate whether a given QC approach can achieve utility-scale operation, meaning its computational value exceeds its cost, by 2033. DARPA can thus help identify the most promising quantum architectures, even accelerating the timeline for practical quantum computing. Being on the DARPA list for evaluation means a head start for a company in proving its promising future.
As a backdrop to the conclusions above, the need for technologies that connect via entangled photons and QPUs is accelerating the development of a quantum-safe internet. This opens additional opportunities for telecom manufacturers and companies to establish leadership in this field by leveraging the power of quantum. With security concerns about hackers becoming more prevalent, cloud-based QC is giving up ground to on-premise and co-located solutions. Data center providers should therefore have or develop a solid plan for QC readiness, whether hybrid or pure-play. Quantum players also need to transition from laboratories to large-scale manufacturing facilities with robust quality systems.
Overall, IEEE Quantum Week 2025 confirmed that hybrid QC/classical computing use cases can be expected to dominate until scale becomes feasible. Investors should also focus on companies that can provide bespoke quantum solutions to specific verticals where the return on investment (ROI) is clear and evident, and sales are materializing.