Welcome to the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology

This year marks one century since the birth of quantum mechanics. This unique branch of physics has morphed and evolved, moving out of the minds of scientists, through laboratories, and straight into business operations, conference keynotes and stock market swings. While the last several years have shown an uptick in growth in the emerging quantum technology market, the timeliness of quantum's 100th birthday has positioned 2025 as a yearlong inflection point for quantum science and technology. With global initiatives, new funding rounds, the achievement of key technical milestones and the portent of scientific breakthroughs, the International Year of Quantum is off to an auspicious start.

There are a few key questions to consider: Does quantum computing really have the potential that has been touted over the past decades, when will that long-awaited quantum age arrive, and what do the answers to the first two questions mean for business and government leaders watching the space? All indicators point to the positive regarding quantum's potential — the industry is growing rapidly, and quantum computers have proven they can solve novel problems effectively. It is almost universally accepted that the advent of commercial-scale quantum computers is now an engineering problem and not a physics problem; the biggest challenges being tackled in the space involve issues of engineering (reliability, scalability and end-user functionality). Quantum's big debut ultimately depends on the timeline of those engineering problems and their subsequent solutions; it is reasonable to assume we will see powerful, commercially useful quantum computers within the next five years or so. That means that the time for preparation and upskilling is growing short. The good news is that the proliferation of quantum access methods, software tools and learning programs has made it easier than ever to get started with quantum technology.

Context

In June 2024, the United Nations proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ). The motion was made in response to a global push from national scientific societies to commemorate 100 years of progress in quantum mechanics, a field whose birth is often set in June 1925 with Werner Heisenberg's first formulation of quantum theory. The early work of notable physicists set the stage for the quantum technology we see today, and while a hundred-year anniversary is always worth celebrating, the UN's timing also serves an added purpose: Quantum technologies have been teetering on the edge of global prominence, and dedicating a whole year to the celebration of quantum tech serves as a neat marketing push to help spur widespread awareness, interest and funding for the nascent industry.

IYQ 2025 kicked off on Feb. 4 with a gala opening ceremony in Paris, attended by academics, governments and corporate representatives of the quantum technology industry. Global events celebrating quantum are planned throughout the year in the US (Florida State University), Malaysia, Spain, Singapore, Iran, Venezuela and beyond. Key partners of IYQ include industry entities — such as Microsoft Corp., Quantinuum, D-Wave Quantum Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., QuEra Computing Inc. and Oxford Instruments PLC — as well as academic, scientific, and philanthropic entities like SC Quantum, the American Physical Society, Chinese Optical Society, Optica, the German Physical Society and Berthold Leibinger Stiftung.

Funding updates, stocks and revenue news

This year has already seen businesses and individuals increasingly putting their money where their mouth is, with a large upswing in everything from quantum funding updates to stock market swings. On the funding front, several quantum technology startups have announced successful funding rounds to kick off the year. In January, France's Alice & Bob SAS announced a series B funding round in which it raised $104.9 million, led by Future French Champions, AVP (AXA Venture Partners) and Bpifrance. Also in January, Swiss quantum hardware company ZuriQ AG raised $4.3 million in a seed funding round led by Founderful, with participation from SquareOne, First Momentum Ventures, OnSight Ventures and QAI Ventures. In February, quantum hardware provider QuEra announced a funding round of over $230 million, with investment from Google LLC's Quantum AI business unit (among others), and Q.M Technologies Ltd. raised $170 million in a series C funding round to bring its funding total to $280 million.

While most of the quantum market is composed of either private quantum startups or research divisions housed within larger technology organizations, there are some publicly traded quantum technology companies. IonQ Inc., D-Wave, Rigetti Computing Inc. and Quantum Computing Inc. are all developing quantum-based hardware, and each has had a wild few months when it comes to their share prices. Burgeoning public and corporate interest in quantum technology has had a notable impact on quantum stock movements: IonQ's share price has increased by nearly 350% over the past six months, and D-Wave, Rigetti and Quantum Computing Inc. have seen their share prices increase by 590%, 1,133% and 1,089% over the same period, respectively.

Quantum stock fever has been massively influenced by the news cycle of late. When Google announced the release of its brand-new quantum chip, Willow, in December 2024, hype surrounding the product and its potential impact on quantum technology propelled quantum stocks to new heights as investors tried to hop in front of the trend. Interestingly, Google stock didn't see much of a long-term boost from the announcement, nor did other large organizations with notable quantum research programs (e.g., Microsoft or International Business Machines Corp.), with investors instead looking to buy in early to smaller quantum-centric companies. Quantum stock volatility continued into 2025 when NVIDIA Corp. CEO Jensen Huang's pessimistic projection about quantum computing timelines went viral and caused quantum stocks to tank. After the dip, however, quantum stocks generally rebounded on the back of advancements in the industry and have remained vastly elevated compared with their positions in mid-2024.

This year has also seen the achievement of a notable revenue milestone by industry leader IBM — in early February, the company informed news outlets that it had booked $1 billion worth of quantum business and highlighted the role quantum and other emerging technologies are anticipated to play in IBM's revenue strategy going forward. While quantum revenue remains a small percentage of IBM's total revenue mix, the fact that real money can be made on the back of quantum technology is a promising indicator of the continued maturation of the quantum market more broadly.

Qubit count and qubit quality

On the technology side of the house, 2025 is poised to deliver some noteworthy advancements. Companies developing quantum computers are still grappling with issues of qubit count and qubit quality — essentially trying to find the best ways to make quantum chips bigger and more performant. While quantum systems are currently operating in the tens to thousands of physical qubits, it is estimated that quantum computers will need to consist of millions of physical qubits to solve useful problems effectively. Different companies are building computers with different types of qubits (for more details about qubit architectures, see our quantum TBI report), but every quantum hardware company is aiming to improve both the qubit count and qubit quality of its systems.

Some companies with early 2025 system releases include Canadian quantum hardware company Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc., which released a new 12-qubit photonic machine called Aurora in late January. Rigetti released its newest quantum computer, Ankaa-3, in December 2024, and announced in February that the 84-qubit superconducting system would also be generally available to the public via Microsoft Azure. In late February, Microsoft made headlines with the unveiling of its first in-house quantum processing unit, Majorana 1, the world's first topological QPU. The Majorana 1 chip is designed for easy scaling, and while Microsoft researchers have placed only 8 qubits on the chip so far, it is built to eventually house one million qubits.

Qubit count totals have generally taken a bit of a backseat as researchers have focused on improving the quality of their qubits, tackling problems such as gate fidelity (a measure of a quantum computer's accuracy during computation) and error correction. Once again, 2025 has already seen a slew of technical achievements in this area: In January, researchers at MIT achieved the highest single-qubit gate fidelity on record, with their superconducting qubit netting a fidelity of 99.998%. High-fidelity gate operations will be required to develop fault-tolerant quantum computers, as will techniques to reduce or correct errors in quantum calculations. Google's Willow demonstrates exponential error correction capability, meaning that the more qubits researchers used in the system, the more errors were reduced. Willow also provides an example of real-time error correction on a superconducting quantum system, an important capability for commercially relevant quantum computations.

Big names make big claims

As these announcements about quantum proliferate, the question on everyone's lips is when "practical" quantum computers will emerge. While there are quantum systems and chips currently available for purchase and use (whether that is on-premises, via the cloud or in colocated datacenters), the world is still holding its breath for the anticipated moment of quantum advantage, when quantum computers can solve novel, useful problems, or solve existing problems in less time with less energy, or with less money.

Over the past few months, some of the world's tech leaders have added their thoughts and estimates to the potential timeline to quantum advantage. NVIDIA's Huang tanked quantum stocks in January with the offhand comment that he believes commercially useful quantum computers are still 15-30 years away (NVIDIA subsequently announced a special Quantum Day, which it will host March 20, to help further discussion about the technology area). Quantum hardware providers immediately jumped into the fray to clarify that, while gate-based, fault-tolerant quantum computers are still in development, today's quantum computers are already being commercialized, and breakthroughs in AI and hybrid computation techniques will likely nudge the arrival of quantum advantage much closer. Google CEO Sundar Pichai anticipates practical quantum computers within the next five to 10 years, while Microsoft's Bill Gates is even more optimistic with the belief that we will see practical quantum computing in the next three to five years.

On the horizon

While the ultimate timing for the emergence of a practical quantum system is up for debate, the pace of advancement occurring in quantum technology is undeniably rapid. Not only is progress being made in quantum computation, but other areas, including quantum communication, have had a stellar start to the year as well. In February, researchers at the University of Oxford successfully demonstrated "quantum teleportation" — the use of quantum entanglement to transmit information (in this case, a quantum algorithm) almost instantaneously across a space. The researchers were able to effectively "connect" two quantum processors together into a single quantum computer, with incredible implications for the future of quantum computing. Quantum teleportation could eliminate the need for massive individual quantum machines, as calculations could instead be performed on teams of smaller systems communicating and working together as one. Quantum teleportation, the ongoing emergence of generative AI and other technical breakthroughs continue to accelerate the pace of quantum innovation. While 2025 is a celebration of 100 years of quantum mechanics, it is also shaping up to be just the start of a very exciting new age of quantum technology..

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This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.
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