Quantum Software, Algorithms & Cloud Access

Quantinuum secured a finalized US$100 million CHIPS R&D award from the U.S. Department of Commerce to support trapped ion quantum computer manufacturing in the United States. The company also announced new collaborations with Quanta Computer and Oracle tied to its trapped ion quantum hardware. As part of the Oracle tie-up, Quantinuum will place its Helios quantum computer inside Oracle data centers to support quantum cloud computing access. Quantinuum, a quantum computing hardware and software specialist in the IT industry, has a market cap of about US$12.7b. The company said the CHIPS R&D award and Oracle data center placement support its push to integrate quantum systems with AI and high performance computing through partners such as Oracle and HPE, though heavy reported losses and the risk of delays around its Sol and Apollo systems remain open issues.

IonQ announced a real-time quantum error correction decoder that runs complex workloads without slowing quantum computations. The company reported new deployments at the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center, integrating its hardware into NVIDIA's quantum research stack, and disclosed a partnership with SDT in South Korea to support quantum computing access for regional enterprises and researchers. IonQ said the decoder handles benchmark circuits with up to 408 logical qubits and more than 31.5 million quantum operations with just 0.02% added time, running on a single off-the-shelf CPU while the quantum system keeps operating. IonQ, a US semiconductor player valued at about $17.4b, builds quantum computing systems for clients in the United States, Switzerland, and other regions. Investors will watch how many Superion 256 deployments move from contract to installed and active systems at sites like NVIDIA's research center, FIU and SDT's data center from 2027.

MarketsandMarkets projects the global post-quantum cryptography market will grow from $0.42 billion in 2025 to $2.84 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 46.2%. The forecast is a third-party projection, not a guarantee, and timelines for quantum capability remain debated, though large infrastructure vendors have started publishing migration dates and quantum hardware companies are reporting rapid revenue growth off small bases. Among this week's developments, Vancouver-based Quantum Secure Encryption Corp. appointed Joseph Hall as Chief Intelligence Officer, adding more than 20 years of frontline cybersecurity and threat intelligence experience, with prior roles including Director of Threat Intel R&D at Infoblox and Principal Security Consultant at Fortinet; he will work with Chief Technology Officer Michael Massing, who previously led Dell SonicWall's Unified Threat Management business unit. QSE also announced grants of 350,000 stock options and 350,000 restricted share units to employees. Separately, Cloudflare announced plans to become a public certificate authority issuing post-quantum Merkle Tree Certificates with production issuance scheduled for the first quarter of 2027, IonQ reported second quarter 2026 revenue of $80.1 million, up 287% year over year, and raised its full-year 2026 revenue outlook to $450 million to $460 million, Akamai announced an $11.6 billion multi-year agreement with Anthropic to supply distributed AI infrastructure and cloud computing services over seven years, and Okta reported second quarter fiscal 2027 total revenue of $805 million, up 11%, guiding to fiscal 2027 revenue of $3.216 billion to $3.226 billion.

IonQ said on September 23 that its Superion 256 will become the first on-premise quantum processor deployed at Nvidia's Accelerated Quantum Research Center, with the deployment planned for 2027. Nvidia will place IonQ's quantum processing unit alongside conventional accelerated computing hardware in a setting designed to develop large-scale hybrid systems, targeting applications including financial optimization, materials science and computational chemistry. IonQ introduced Superion 256 on September 8 and has begun accepting orders, with first customer deliveries expected in 2027 and commercially manufacturable fault-tolerant systems targeted for 2028. On September 22, IonQ reported a decoder breakthrough, demonstrating a real-time decoder running continuously on a single conventional CPU across benchmark circuits simulating up to 408 logical qubits and more than 31.5 million quantum operations, with as little as 0.02% additional execution time. The financial value of the Nvidia deployment has not been disclosed, and IonQ's 2026 revenue guidance of $450 million to $460 million includes SkyWater revenue from July 31 through year-end, so the increase cannot be attributed entirely to accelerating organic quantum-computing revenue.

International Business Machines and NASA have released an open Lunar Foundation Model for scientific lunar research to the public, while IBM, Lockheed Martin and ETH Zurich have created a quantum innovation hub to broaden access to quantum computing research and training. The ETH Zurich quantum hub is intended to support industrial use cases in areas such as materials science, financial services and aerospace. International Business Machines is a US IT group with a US$216.3b market cap that sells integrated hardware, software and services, and its work with NASA and the ETH Zurich quantum hub taps into areas where large research and enterprise clients already use its infrastructure and consulting capabilities. The clearest test of the bull case will come as IBM reports how many paying industrial and research workloads actually run on Quantum System Two and related services at ETH Zurich once that system is deployed, and whether management starts breaking out any quantum or lunar AI related revenue or backlog in future quarterly updates. The bear case centers on execution risk in turning complex research collaborations into scalable, high margin Software and Consulting revenue rather than isolated projects.

IonQ reported second-quarter 2026 sales of $80.1 million, up 287% from a year earlier, with part of that growth coming from a series of acquisitions and the rest from organic quantum revenue. Management estimates organic revenue will double for the full calendar year 2026, helping total sales, including acquisitions and organic growth, reach an estimated $455 million this year, a 60% increase over the company's previous guidance, though the raised full-year revenue guidance came just after IonQ completed its purchase of the chip foundry business SkyWater Technology on July 31. The company's non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA loss widened to $120.3 million in the second quarter from $36.5 million a year earlier, driven by expensive research and development costs and rising sales and general administrative costs, and that loss far exceeded quarterly revenue. IonQ holds cash and cash equivalents of $3 billion, giving it substantial runway despite being unprofitable, while its stock trades at a price-to-sales ratio of 51, well above the tech sector average of about 7, even after a roughly 42% share price decline over the past year.

IonQ shares jumped 10.1% in the afternoon session after the quantum computing company announced joint research with Synopsys showing that quantum algorithms accelerated industrial design simulations by up to 14.6%. According to a company press release, the work embedded an advanced quantum algorithm into Synopsys's Ansys LS-DYNA simulation software to reorganize equations more efficiently and cut calculation time for complex automotive and jet-engine simulations. IonQ said the approach helps relieve computational bottlenecks that slow classical supercomputers, and the joint paper earned a first-place Best Paper Award at IEEE Quantum Week 2026. The stock is down 13.5% since the beginning of the year, and at $40.47 per share it is trading 50.7% below its 52-week high of $82.09 from October 2025. The previous big move came 8 days earlier, when the stock dropped 4.4% after Mizuho Securities analyst Vijay Rakesh lowered his price target to $52 from $61 while maintaining a Buy rating following the company's Analyst Day.

Nvidia launched CUDA-Q Logical, an open-source orchestration layer built into its CUDA-Q platform, on September 14. The tool is designed to help researchers develop applications for fault-tolerant quantum computers using logical qubits, and it is available on GitHub. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, IQM Quantum Computers, Sandia National Laboratories, Infleqtion, QCDesign, and Quantum Motion are already using the technology. The launch supports Nvidia's broader strategy of making its GPUs the key classical computing layer for hybrid quantum-classical systems, though Jensen Huang said in January 2025 that useful quantum computers could still be 15 to 30 years away, a view tied to the unresolved challenge of scaling quantum hardware. Hedge fund ownership of Nvidia rose from 275 funds at the end of Q1 2026 to 285 funds at the end of Q2 2026, while short interest stood at 1.29% of float as of August 31, 2026.

IBM and IonQ shares rallied Thursday on separate quantum computing developments. IBM's Anderon subsidiary finalized a $1 billion award from the U.S. Department of Commerce under the CHIPS and Science Act, funding research and development at a 300-millimeter quantum wafer facility in Albany, New York, with IBM committing another $1 billion to the project. IonQ, working with NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, developed a generative AI method for producing quantum optimization circuits that maintained a roughly 28-second generation time across tested problem sizes. The two developments mark separate areas of industry progress, with IBM expanding quantum manufacturing capacity while IonQ focuses on reducing computational demands in quantum optimization.

Nvidia unveiled new quantum-development software Monday, claiming a sevenfold acceleration in a research workflow, even as its shares traded around $210.87, down approximately 3.5%. The company said Fermilab compressed five months of research work into three weeks in an architecture-development workflow, and that its new open-source CUDA-Q Logical layer supports development of fault-tolerant quantum applications. The distinction matters because researchers completed a design workflow faster, which does not establish faster quantum hardware, commercial viability or additional sales. For shareholders, the potential payoff comes from supplying the computing resources behind quantum research, though that commercial outcome remains unproven. GuruFocus shows a GF Score of 95/100, with profitability and growth standing out while a weaker GF Value reading puts valuation under greater scrutiny.

Infleqtion announced results from its integration of NVIDIA CUDA-Q Logical with the qLDPC open-source library for quantum error correction research, making it among the first organizations building on the platform NVIDIA just announced as a logical orchestration layer for fault-tolerant quantum algorithms. Working with an early-access version of CUDA-Q Logical, Infleqtion researchers constructed and validated a high-rate quantum error correction code that uses approximately six physical data qubits per logical qubit, representing about a fivefold improvement in code rate over the surface-code approach used for comparison. That physical-to-logical qubit ratio is below 10:1 and represents progress toward Infleqtion's architectural target for near-term systems. Infleqtion open-sourced qLDPC last year in work alongside researchers from JPMorgan Chase, and the company is now extending the workflow toward physical execution by adding syndrome extraction, neutral-atom noise modeling and decoder benchmarking. Chief Technology Officer and General Manager of Quantum Computing Pranav Gokhale said the code and the machine must be designed together, while NVIDIA Director of Quantum Product Sam Stanwyck said the integration shows how researchers can design and evaluate logical qubit workloads end to end. Infleqtion will share additional company updates and new milestones at Quantum World Congress in College Park, Maryland, where Chief Executive Officer Matt Kinsella will deliver a plenary keynote on September 24.

BlueQubit announced the open call for its Quantum Flywheel grant program, a $150,000 initiative created with support from IBM, Amazon Web Services, and NVIDIA accelerated computing. The three-month program provides research teams with cloud compute credits for QPU, CPU, and GPU resources, along with access to frontier AI models and BlueQubit's quantum-native development environment. Proposals are invited across three areas: developing and testing novel quantum algorithms on IBM quantum computers targeting quantum advantage in simulation and optimization, conducting adversarial classical simulation with tensor networks and Pauli-path methods to stress-test published quantum advantage claims, and using frontier AI agents to discover, decode, and evaluate novel quantum error-correction codes aimed at mitigating hardware noise. Selected teams will receive direct access to high-performance classical supercomputing, including NVIDIA GPU instances on AWS and large core CPU machines via BlueQubit's simulation platform, with end-to-end support from code generation to QPU execution on IBM quantum computers. The open call runs for a five-week submission window, and selected researchers will receive three months of continuous hardware and compute access.

NVIDIA announced an expansion of its CUDA-Q open source platform with CUDA-Q Logical, an orchestration layer that provides a programmable, verifiable approach to developing applications for fault-tolerant quantum computers. Fault-tolerant quantum processors with logical qubits are essential for useful quantum computing, and CUDA-Q Logical lets researchers design and orchestrate the many components such applications require, switching between algorithm, error-correction and hardware options to find optimal configurations. Fermilab used CUDA-Q Logical to validate prior results and evaluate physical qubits, runtimes and other resource requirements across different error-correction approaches and quantum hardware, accelerating fault-tolerant algorithm development from five months to three weeks, a 7x speedup. Iceberg Quantum used CUDA-Q Logical to model its fault-tolerant architecture for Diraq's qubits, showing how 1,000 logical qubits can be created with just 150,000 physical qubits, roughly 10x fewer than Diraq's previous estimates. Sandia National Laboratories developed QUOPS, a new independent cross-platform benchmark measuring progress toward utility-scale quantum applications, and a QUOPS reference implementation is now available in NVIDIA CUDA-Q; Sandia shared early results in a preprint ahead of IEEE Quantum Week, reporting initial QUOPS benchmarks for QPUs from Google, IBM and Quantinuum. CUDA-Q Logical is already being used by QPU makers and labs including Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Infleqtion, IQM Quantum Computers, QCDesign Quantum Motion and Sandia National Laboratories, and is now available through GitHub.

IBM is expanding its quantum computing footprint by establishing a new quantum innovation hub at ETH Zurich in collaboration with Lockheed Martin, with plans to bring an IBM Quantum System Two to the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano. Under an offset agreement with armasuisse, Switzerland's Federal Office for Defense Procurement, IBM will operate the quantum computer, powered by its Quantum Nighthawk processor, supporting research in chemistry, materials science, optimization and financial services while giving Swiss businesses, startups and academic institutions access to the technology. IBM will also support quantum education through courses, certifications, workshops and hackathons. The Lockheed Martin collaboration will explore quantum technologies for aerospace and defense through two planned joint development projects, one examining quantum sensing for navigation and another targeting improvements in additive manufacturing involving metallic alloys. The venture strengthens IBM's long-standing relationship with ETH Zurich and supports a new 10-year effort to develop foundational algorithms for AI and quantum computing.

IonQ has launched Superion 256, its sixth-generation quantum computing platform and the foundation for future compute products, with customer deliveries set for 2027. The platform moved from early design to trapping ions in under a year, and IonQ fabricated its first fully integrated 256-qubit quantum processing units at its SkyWater subsidiary, with prototype Superion 256 systems now trapping ions at multiple U.S. facilities. IonQ and SkyWater jointly designed and fabricated the chip, completing six tapeouts in the first half of 2026 and cutting the design cycle to two months from nine months, while delivering 12 times more wafer lots over six months than at a previous foundry. At the core of Superion 256 is IonQ's Electronic Qubit Control, which controls trapped-ion qubits with electronics integrated directly into the chip rather than with laser systems, using the same technology behind IonQ's 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity world record in October 2025. The platform scales from 256 qubits to millions of qubits, and Superion 10K is already underway, integrating CMOS into the chip. IonQ is taking orders for Superion 256 now and pre-sold its first system in the first quarter of 2026, while production-grade systems will also run on its cloud.

Qedma Quantum Computing and the HQC2 team at the University of Copenhagen, the Technical University of Denmark, and the University of Southern Denmark have published a collaborative study demonstrating that error mitigation can dramatically improve the reliability of quantum chemistry on today's processors. The study, which explored the potential energy surface of a water molecule on IBM's Aachen quantum processor using Qedma's QESEM software, achieved a 30–50× improvement over raw results without error mitigation. The findings will be presented at Q2B Copenhagen on September 9–10, 2026. Qedma CEO Dr. Asif Sinay said the work shows a strong proof of concept for applying quantum computing to quantum chemistry on current hardware. The research was part of the Q-CHEMION project under the Eureka open call for applied quantum technologies.

IBM Ventures has invested in BQP, the physics acceleration company, bringing its total funding to $8 million and backing the expansion of its BQPhy platform from engineering design into real-time operational decisions. The investment extends a technical relationship that began in 2023 when BQP joined the IBM Quantum Network. BQP's flagship platform, BQPhy, is in production with aerospace and defense customers, and the company has grown contracted and committed revenue eightfold since its 2025 seed round, tripling its customer base and growing platform users twentyfold. The investment also includes participation from Venn10 Capital and existing investor Monta Vista Capital. BQP's technology addresses the inefficiency of classical solvers, which leave roughly 85% of a GPU's floating-point capacity idle, by using that capacity to resolve full-fidelity physics within operational decision windows.

Oracle extended its long-term collaboration with Amazon Web Services to help enterprises run Oracle AI Database workloads on AWS, and separately entered a partnership with Quantinuum to deliver hybrid quantum computing services through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The AWS agreement makes Oracle AI Database services available in 22 AWS regions, aiming to lower friction for large customers already on AWS. The Quantinuum collaboration adds its Helios system to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, giving Oracle a way to serve early hybrid quantum plus AI workloads on its existing high-performance compute and GPU stack. The deals come as Oracle faces strong AI-driven remaining performance obligations alongside planned capital expenditure of up to US$35 billion per year and pressure on free cash flow. The clearest test will be Oracle's upcoming preview and launch of its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure quantum service and future disclosures on Oracle AI Database@AWS adoption.

A new report from ResearchAndMarkets.com projects the global quantum computing market will grow from $1.93 billion in 2026 to $21.86 billion by 2035, a compound annual growth rate of 30.92%. The study highlights accelerating commercial momentum, including IonQ's record $80 million in second-quarter 2026 revenue and D-Wave's 1,120% bookings growth, alongside expanded cloud quantum deployments by Alphabet's Google and Microsoft. Key drivers include rising demand for high-performance computing beyond classical limits, growth of Quantum-as-a-Service platforms, and increasing government funding. North America leads the market, while optimization remains the dominant application and the banking, financial services, and insurance sector is the top end-use industry.

Quantum computing exchange-traded funds have posted strong year-to-date gains amid historic U.S. government funding commitments to the sector. The Defiance Quantum ETF has surged 38.4%, the WisdomTree Quantum Computing Fund has soared 30.9%, and the Global X AI Semiconductor & Quantum ETF has rallied 69.9%. Driving the momentum are federal initiatives including $625 million from the Department of Energy to renew five National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, $2 billion in CHIPS Act incentives for domestic quantum foundries, and a $1 billion award to IBM to anchor a new U.S.-based quantum chip foundry in Albany, New York. Recent technological breakthroughs, such as Quantinuum's 98-qubit Helios system operating beyond classical simulation and NVIDIA's launch of open-source quantum AI models, have further validated the industry's commercial potential.

The Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, together with Charoen Pokphand Group, True Corporation, QTRic, and qBraid, has launched Quantum Club Thailand, a national quantum technology collaboration platform. It aims to connect the government, universities, researchers, industry, startups, and global partners, driven by four core missions: building human capital, advancing research, upgrading industry, and creating commercially viable innovations. The initiative begins with three flagship projects: Quantum Academy Thailand, Quantum Industry Lab, and Quantum Innovation Challenge. Professor Dr. Yotsanun Wongsawat, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, stated that quantum technology will be a key factor in enhancing the country's competitiveness, and that workforce development must be accelerated alongside pushing research into industry. Mr. Supachai Chearavanont, Senior Vice Chairman of Charoen Pokphand Group and Chairman of True Corporation, emphasized that the transition to the quantum era requires transforming Thailand from a technology follower into a technology co-creator, with people development as the top priority. QTRic has over 80 quantum technology prototypes and a network of more than 120 researchers from 19 partner organizations, ready to leverage this platform to create commercial use cases and propel Thailand toward becoming a quantum hub for ASEAN. Meanwhile, qBraid will support access to world-class quantum platforms and AI-driven tools, as well as help build talent and connect Thailand with international networks.

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that its ME Innovation Fund has invested in JIJ Inc., a Japanese startup developing middleware for mathematical optimization using quantum computers. The investment, the fund’s fifteenth to date, will combine JIJ’s JijZept development platform with Mitsubishi Electric’s quantum technologies and application development expertise to accelerate commercial adoption. Mitsubishi Electric has positioned quantum computing as a key priority in its R&D strategy, aiming to establish technological superiority and speed up industrial implementation. JIJ CEO Yu Yamashiro said the partnership will advance the business application of quantum and optimization technologies.

Mr. Suphachai Chearavanont has proposed a public-private partnership model, or PPP, to invest in establishing five major national Innovation Centers within five years, with a budget of approximately 100 billion baht, or about 3 billion US dollars. The centers will cover quantum technology, AI, robotics and automation, biotechnology, and advanced materials. He noted that the CP Group has already made an initial investment of 2.5 billion baht and proposed that the government provide support through tax measures and a Matching Fund to attract investment and build the country's advanced technology ecosystem. Additionally, the Quantum Club Thailand was launched as a national quantum technology collaboration platform, resulting from cooperation between the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, Charoen Pokphand Group, AIS, True Corporation, QTRic, and qBraid from the United States, aiming to develop human resources, drive research, and accelerate the application of quantum technology in the industrial sector.

Investors looking to gain exposure to quantum computing before it matures are buying shares of Alphabet, IonQ, and Nvidia. Alphabet is developing its own quantum computing unit, including the Willow chip, which could boost margins for its Google Cloud division that is already seeing 82% year-over-year revenue growth. IonQ is pursuing a trapped-ion approach that prioritizes accuracy over speed and has a roadmap to a 10,000-qubit computer, though it remains a smaller, higher-risk play. Nvidia is not building a quantum processor but is positioning its GPUs as essential for hybrid quantum-classical computing through tools like an AI model for error correction, CUDA adaptations, and the NVQLink interconnect.

IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna told Mad Money that quantum computing will have a measurable impact on the company's top and bottom line by 2028 or 2029, and that by the end of the 2030s it represents a trillion dollars of value. Krishna also addressed near-term concerns, noting that about 40% of delayed capital spending deals disclosed in the second quarter had already closed within three to four weeks, and reaffirmed full-year guidance of four-to-five percent constant currency revenue growth with free cash flow increasing by about one billion dollars year-over-year. IBM plans to invest more than ten billion dollars in quantum computing over the next five years and remains on track to deliver its first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029, backed in part by a one-billion-dollar CHIPS incentive commitment and a matching one billion dollars from IBM for the world's first pure-play quantum wafer foundry. The company also announced quantum advantage demonstrations with startup Algorithmiq, the University of Chicago, and Qedma Quantum Computing, solving problems beyond the reach of classical supercomputers.

IBM and its partners report multiple independent breakthroughs in quantum computing, achieving quantum advantage using error mitigated computations that classical systems cannot feasibly reproduce. The collaborations span Algorithmiq, Qedma, RIKEN, BlueQubit, and the University of Chicago, focusing on verification frameworks, logical qubits, and commercial error mitigation. IBM is positioning its quantum hardware and software stack as part of a broader computing toolkit, aiming to offer quantum as a cloud service alongside hybrid cloud and AI. The company is trying to show that its tools can tackle problems that high-end classical systems, such as Japan's Fugaku supercomputer, struggle to reproduce. These recent breakthroughs in error handling and verification may shape how quickly enterprises consider quantum resources for real workloads.

BlueQubit, Qedma Quantum Computing, IBM and RIKEN have demonstrated that today's quantum computers can solve problems beyond the reach of classical machines. The team simulated a Floquet Ising magnet's sub-atomic oscillations, with RIKEN pushing classical simulation to its limits using over 500,000 CPU-core hours on the Fugaku supercomputer and BlueQubit running tensor network and Pauli path algorithms on GPU clusters. Qedma deployed its QESEM error-mitigation software on IBM's 156-qubit Heron quantum processor and validated results across platforms including Quantinuum's trapped-ion systems, achieving percent-level accuracy. The error-mitigated quantum system delivered reliable results when advanced classical methods could no longer converge, marking a pivotal shift where quantum processors outpace classical computers.

The governments of Japan and Australia have agreed to strengthen cooperation in the field of quantum technology. Minister of State for Science and Technology Policy Kimi Onoda and Australian Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science Ed Husic signed a memorandum of understanding in Sydney on the 27th. They will advance collaboration on building supply chains related to quantum computers, research and development, practical application, startup support, and talent development. Japan has already concluded similar memoranda with the United States and India, and this agreement with Australia is expected to accelerate coordination on quantum technology utilization under the Quad framework of Japan, the United States, Australia, and India. Mr. Husic emphasized the significance of the agreement, stating that it will lead to faster dissemination of quantum technology in both Japan and Australia and across the Indo-Pacific region.

Shares of D-Wave Quantum soared on Monday after the company broadened its partnership with AT&T. Early tests of D-Wave's quantum technology helped AT&T slash the run time for a network optimization process from roughly one hour to less than 15 seconds, prompting the telecom giant to expand the use of D-Wave's tech to areas such as outage detection, network planning, and traffic management. Benchmark analyst Gary Mobley has a buy rating on D-Wave's shares and sees the stock price rising more than 50% to $30, noting that D-Wave is delivering an actual quantum advantage to users by solving real-world practical problems. Mobley also cautioned that with the technology still in its early stages, investors may be best served by spreading their bets across multiple quantum stocks.

Nvidia, Microsoft, and Alphabet are positioning themselves as upstream providers to the quantum computing industry, which McKinsey estimates could grow from $1 billion today to $4.4 billion by 2028. Nvidia does not build quantum chips but offers CUDA-Q software and the NVQLink interconnect, already adopted by 17 quantum builders and nine national labs, and stands to benefit from selling classical computing power needed for error correction regardless of qubit type. Microsoft runs the Azure Quantum marketplace, reselling access to hardware from partners like Quantinuum and IonQ, while developing its own Majorana 2 topological chip, which it claims is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor. Alphabet’s Google Quantum AI builds superconducting chips such as the 105-qubit Willow processor, which demonstrated exponential error reduction and a computational advantage, and may eventually sell access through Google Cloud. Among the three, Nvidia is identified as the best pick-and-shovel play due to its direct, qubit-agnostic exposure, with Microsoft a close second for its low-risk marketplace model.

A new report from ResearchAndMarkets.com finds that private investment in quantum technology accelerated to approximately US$4.9 billion in 2025, a 192% year-on-year increase, while cumulative investment since 2012 exceeded US$65 billion. The Quantum Investment Report & Company Directory 2026 profiles 313 companies across quantum computing, hardware, software, sensing, and communications and security, including Infleqtion, IQM, Xanadu, Pasqal, and Quantinuum, which filed for a potential US$20 billion initial public offering. Government funding remains central, accounting for an estimated 65% to 75% of total investment, and the report compares national quantum programs across more than a dozen countries. The 342-page publication also analyzes investment by technology subsector, application area, and region, and provides a market forecast through 2036.