Top quantum breakthroughs of 2025 - Major Digest

In all the hype about AI it can be easy to forget that we’re witnessing another revolution in computing: the beginning of the quantum era.

Quantum computers are expected to tackle problems completely out of reach of today’s machines, bringing about new developments in chemistry, biology and physics. They’ll also be able to tackle problems of interest to the average enterprise, such as logistics, AI and encryption, proponents say.

At the beginning of this year, however, it all seemed far away.

“AI is dominating the attention economy,” says James Sanders, semiconductor industry analyst at TechInsights. “The incrementalism of quantum computing is difficult to translate to public interest, against the backdrop of AI.”

In fact, in January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that quantum computing is still 15 to 30 years from being truly useful.

The industry spent the year trying to prove him wrong. Here are 10 areas in which we’ve seen significant breakthroughs and milestones in quantum computing.

1. World’s most powerful computer enables quantum AI

On November 5, Quantinuum announced the commercial launch of its new Helios quantum computer, claiming to be the most accurate commercial system available today. “You would need to harvest every star in the universe to power a classical machine that could do the same calculations we did with Helios,” said Anthony Ransford, Helios lead architect, in a statement.

According to the company, it’s the most accurate computer to date, can be programmed just like a classical computer, and uses industry tools like Nvidia’s CUDA-Q. In addition, early testers such as SoftBank and JPMorgan Chase have already conducted “commercially relevant research,” the company said. Other early testers include Amgen, which is exploring hybrid quantum-machine learning for biologics, and BMW, which is doing research on fuel cells.

“For the first time enterprises can access a highly accurate, general-purpose quantum computer to drive real world impact,” said Rajeeb Hazra, Quantinuum president and CEO, in the announcement.

Quantinuum also partnered with Nvidia to accelerate the combination of quantum computing and generative AI via NVQLink.

In a sign of how seriously the industry is taking the company, Fidelity just joined Quantinuum’s latest funding round, bringing the total to $800 million raised, for a valuation of $10 billion.

2. Record levels of investment

Quantinuum isn’t the only company to rake in money this year. In September, photonic qubits company PsiQuantum became the world’s most funded quantum startup, raising $1 billion in funding to build a commercially useful quantum computer. That brought its valuation to $7 billion, which was a lot at the time.

According to research from SpinQ, quantum computing companies raised $3.77 billion in equity funding during the first nine months of 2025 — nearly triple the $1.3 billion raised in all of 2024.

There are also publicly-traded quantum computing firms, chief among them being Rigetti, IonQ, Quantum Computing and D-Wave, and their stock prices have been on a wild ride lately. According to Motley Fool, share prices have gone up by more than 3,000% over the past year.

“Such significant financings reflect investor confidence in near-term commercialization milestones,” says Yuval Boger, chief commercial officer at QuEra Computing. “And they prompt vendors, customers and funding agencies to treat quantum technologies as entering a deployment phase rather than purely an R&D play.”

In fact, national governments invested $10 billion by April of this year, up from $1.8 billion in all of 2024, according to SpinQ.

Most recently, on November 6, DARPA announced the next stage of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, selecting 11 quantum computing firms for up to $15 million each in funding to help get us to utility-scale computing by 2033.

3. Commercial applications

Like Quantinuum’s testers, a number of companies have said they’re finding commercial value in quantum computing.

In September, HSBC announced that they were able to use IBM’s Heron quantum computer to improve their bond trading predictions by 34% compared to classical computing alone. While this is the only public announcement, so far, of using quantum computing for trading, it doesn’t mean that other financial firms aren’t already doing it without publicity.

In March, engineering company Ansys used IonQ’s quantum computer to speed up its analysis of fluid interactions in medical devices by 12% compared to classical computing alone.

Also in March, Ford Otosan announced that they used D-Wave’s quantum annealing technology to reduce scheduling times from 30 minutes to less than five. And this wasn’t just a test. This is deployed in production.

D-Wave’s quantum computer is not a general-purpose quantum machine like those made by other quantum computing companies but is more akin to an analogue computer. But it is particularly good at solving optimization problems such as those that come up in logistics and supply chain management.

In July, D-Wave sponsored a survey, conducted by Wakefield Research, of 400 business leaders working in optimization. According to the survey, 81% of leaders said that they’ve reached the limit of what they can do with classical computers, and 53% are already planning to build quantum computing into their workflows. Twenty-two percent said that they already see quantum making a “huge impact” for the early adopters, and another 50% expect it to be disruptive for the industry. Of those who haven’t yet implemented quantum optimization, 31% expect to roll it out within the next two years.

Another emerging use case for quantum computing is the combination of quantum and AI. In a May survey of 500 global business leaders by SAS, 60% said they are actively investing in, or exploring opportunities, in quantum AI.

And, according to a report by Bain, quantum computing could unlock up to $250 billion of market value for the pharmaceutical, finance, logistics, and materials science industries — though the total market for quantum computing is less than $1 billion today.

4. Quantum error correction reaches practical milestones

All of the above announcements were made possible by dramatic improvement in error correction.

The problem is that qubits are very sensitive. Vibrations, temperature changes, really anything can cause them to generate errors. To address the problem, quantum computing companies added extra qubits as backups. But as the quantum computers got bigger, the error rates would go up even faster, meaning that it was impossible to catch up.

In the last couple of years, researchers started to find ways around this problem, both in making the individual qubits less prone to errors, and by improving the error-correction mechanisms. This year, the error-correction announcements became a tsunami of progress.

Companies announcing error-correction developments this year include QuEra, with its “magic states” announcement, as well as Alice & Bob, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Quantinuum, IonQ, Nord Quantique, Infleqtion, and Rigetti, among others.

“I think we’re very comfortably in the era of escape velocity,” says Fred Chong, ACM fellow and a professor at University of Chicago. “The quantum devices are fairly good, and error correction codes have gotten better.” Chong is also the chief scientist for quantum software at ColdQuanta and an advisory board member for Quantum Circuits.

This means that building a big, useful, quantum computer is no longer a physics problem but an engineering problem, he says. And since engineering progresses more reliably than basic science, quantum companies are no longer waiting for science breakthroughs that may or may not happen.

IBM released its updated quantum roadmap in June, laying out its plans for a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. IonQ also released its accelerated roadmap in June, with 1,600 logical qubits in 2028, 8,000 in 2029, and 80,000 in 2030.

5. More firms join the ‘quantum advantage’ club

Quantum computing is still in its infancy, so when one of these tiny new quantum computers outperforms a giant classical supercomputer, it’s big news. This year, several companies joined the quantum advantage club — or claimed that they had.

In March, D-Wave announced that they’d achieved the world’s “first and only demonstration of quantum computational supremacy on a useful, real-world problem.” The company claimed that its annealing quantum computer outperformed one of the world’s most powerful classic supercomputers in solving a magnetic materials simulation problem.

In China, scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China reported in August that their Jiuzhang 4.0 photonic quantum computer achieved quantum advantage — but for a very narrow, limited-use Gaussian boson sampling task. Still, the supercomputer El Capitan would have taken longer than the age of the universe to carry out the same task, the researchers said — specifically a million trillion trillion trillion years.

In October, IonQ said it had already achieved quantum advantage in drug discovery and engineering applications and, in a separate announcement, said that it had surpassed classical methods in chemistry simulations.

Also in October, Google announced that they were able to run a verifiable test where their quantum computer was 13,000 times faster than the world’s fastest classical supercomputer. Google said that this was the first time in history that this happened. Specifically, that this was the first time such a test was run with a verifiable algorithm, one that anyone could go out and test for themselves.

The thing is, it’s hard to compare apples to apples here, because every company uses the benchmark that makes its own computers look best.

“Everybody solves the problem with some combination of hardware and software tricks,” says Sridhar Tayur, professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “Shouldn’t there be a set of benchmarks, where you write down exactly what you did, what classical computer did you use, how much time was spent on classical, and how much time was spent on quantum? That would be nice — but that has been missing. There has been no verification and no comparison.”

However, IBM has released a set of industry benchmarks this year, he adds.

In July, IBM researchers also released a paper explaining why it is so difficult to accurately evaluate quantum advantage claims. According to IBM, real quantum advantage requires industry consensus — but that this will be achieved sometime before the end of 2026. The researchers also added that IBM itself has already surpassed classical computers in some respects.

“We have arrived already at a place where quantum computing is a useful scientific tool capable of performing computations that even the best exact classical algorithms can’t,” the researchers wrote. “We and our partners are already conducting a range of experiments on quantum computers that are competitive with the leading classical approximation methods.”

For example, in June, IBM partnered with RIKEN to use the IBM Quantum Heron processor alongside the Fugaku supercomputer to simulate molecules at a level beyond the ability of classical computers alone, and at “utility scale,” IBM said.

6. New hardware breakthroughs in size and qubit types

Many companies announced hardware breakthroughs this year, including Microsoft’s new Majorana 1 chip and Amazon’s new Ocelot chip. (Google announced their new Willow chip in December of last year.)

But the biggest announcement, in terms of the number of qubits involved, has to be Caltech’s record-breaking 6,100-qubit array.

In a September announcement, Caltech researchers said that they split a laser beam into 12,000 parts in order to trap 6,100 cesium atoms. These qubits stayed in superposition for 13 seconds, ten times longer than previous arrays, and were even able to move the atoms round. Being able to move qubits opens the door to more efficient error correction and is a key benefit of this neutral atom approach to quantum computers.

7. Quantum-classical hybrids become all the rage

IBM wasn’t the only company combining quantum computers with classical ones for extra oomph.

Nvidia has leaned into this heavily. At the end of October, the company announced an open system architecture for coupling its GPUs with quantum processors to build quantum supercomputers. The new platform, called NVQLink, is also integrated with Nvidia’s CUDA-Q quantum software platform.

Partners include many of the top firms in the quantum computing industry, including Alice & Bob, Anyon Computing, Atom Computing, Diraq, Infleqtion, IonQ, IQM Quantum Computers, ORCA Computing, Oxford Quantum Circuits, Pasqal, Quandela, Quantinuum, Quantum Circuits Inc., Quantum Machines, Quantum Motion, QuEra, Rigetti, SEEQC and Silicon Quantum Computing — as well as quantum control system builders including Keysight Technologies, Quantum Machines, Qblox, QubiC and Zurich Instruments.

“If you think of the science and chemistry problems people anticipate solving with quantum computers, the way we solve them today is with high performance computing,” says Scott Buchholz, government and public services CTO and quantum computing lead at Deloitte. “So having them talk to each other, and having each one focus on the things it’s strongest on, is actually a good idea.”

8. Qubit types proliferate

If anyone was hoping that 2025 would help us see which approach to quantum computing was going to be the winner, they would be disappointed.

While superconducting circuits — the computers that look like giant chandeliers — were still big, there was a lot of progress on other approaches.

DARPA’s list of Quantum Benchmarking Initiative companies has two companies with neutral atom qubits (Atom Computing and Quera), four companies with silicon spin qubits (Diraq, Photonic, Quantum Motion, and Silicon Quantum Computing), two companies with superconducting qubits (IBM and Nord Quantique), two companies with trapped ion qubits (IonQ and Quantinuum), and one company with photonic qubits (Xanadu).

PsiQuantum unveiled its photonic quantum processor in February. And we even saw brand new types of qubits, such as Microsoft’s new Majorana 1 chip, which uses the topological qubit approach.

Amazon’s Ocelot chip uses a unique hybrid approach, combining cat qubits with transmon qubits. And Quantum Circuits also follows a new approach. It’s a superconducting circuit qubit, but with a “dual rail” control mechanism.

“With the dual-rail approach we’ve built a computer that’s very reliable,” says Andrei Petrenko, Quantum Circuits’ head of product. “It combines the reliability benchmarks of trapped ions and neutral atoms with the speed of the superconducting platform.” The dual-rail is like a check-engine light, he adds. “No other quantum computer tells you in real time if it encounters an error, but ours does.”

In October, Quantum Circuits announced a partnership with Nvidia and support for CUDA-Q, and, in February, a proof-of-concept project related to drug discovery.

9. Post-quantum cryptography becomes enterprise priority

In May, Google researchers combined advances in error correction and quantum operations with more efficient algorithms to make breaking RSA encryption 20 times easier. That means enterprises may have less time than they planned to move to the new quantum-safe encryption algorithms.

“Our post-quantum cryptography team is ringing the fire bell,” says Isabella Bello Martinez, senior quantum technologist at Booz Allen Hamilton.

With the industry advancing to fault-tolerant computers faster than expected, the deadline is approaching quickly. “That is a cause for concern for organizations who have not yet thought about post-quantum cryptography,” she says. “Or they think that someone else will take care of it, that Microsoft will take care of it — you have to think about how everything you use works together.”

And it’s more than just the fact that adversaries will be able to use quantum computers to decrypt today’s standard encryption someday. They can also vacuum up encrypted data now and save it to decrypt later.

Fortunately, we do now have five NIST-certified post-quantum algorithms.

10. Nobel Prize in Physics for superconducting quantum circuits

Finally, to cap off a groundbreaking year for quantum computing, three scientists received the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on superconducting quantum circuits. The work itself was done in the 1980s and showed that quantum effects can show up even in large-scale things — a super-cold superconducting circuit can effectively act as it was a single quantum object, as if it was a single atom or subatomic particle.

The fact that they got the award this year shows how important this work has become to today’s quantum computers and sensors. According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prizes, these awards are given for “achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”

Superconducting circuits are the foundational technology for many of today’s most advanced quantum computers, including those built by Google and IBM, says University of Chicago’s Chong, as well as quantum sensors. “And they’re relatively large, much larger than an atom,” he adds. “Larger than you would expect to see quantum effects. This macroscale is what this Nobel Prize is recognizing.”

Who would have expected 2025 to turn out to be as big for quantum as it was? Well, the United Nations, for one. In mid-2024, the United Nations declared 2025 to be the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.

And so far, it is.