Each year, we like to peer into the immediate future by tapping into the collective wisdom of the smartest people we know — our readers and the thought leaders who deeply understand the industry.
The following is a collection of quotes, thoughts and excerpts about the immediate future of the quantum industry from readers and sources, on which The Quantum Insider relies.
There are lots of predictions for 2026 — from ideas on how technology will advance (or not) to what our workforce needs in quantum will be.
Let’s get after it… And happy New Year!
Xanadu
Christian Weedbrook, Founder and CEO
Prediction 1: Market Feasibility Breakthrough
2026 is poised to be a pivotal year where quantum computing begins to demonstrate clearer pathways toward commercial viability. We expect to see compelling proof-of-concept demonstrations in quantum chemistry and materials science, particularly in highly coupled electronic systems that are fundamentally challenging for classical methods. As quantum hardware continues to advance, these demonstrations will be crucial steps towards measurable accuracy improvements and order-of-magnitude reductions in simulation cost or time-to-solution compared to leading classical approximations.
Key technical milestones will include the integration of early fault-tolerant building blocks, improved error rates, and scalable system architectures, enabling deeper and more reliable quantum circuits. This progress will be driven by advances in low-loss photonic integrated circuits, hybrid quantum-classical workflows, and production-grade software frameworks, positioning the industry, and photonic platforms in particular, for the first sustained steps toward practical quantum advantage.
Prediction 2: Government Investment & Collaboration Surge
2026 is expected to see continued momentum in government quantum initiatives, with nations expanding long-term investment as quantum technologies move from pure research toward strategic infrastructure. We anticipate growth in mission-oriented public-private collaborations, including national testbeds, applied research consortiums, and pilot deployment programs that connect industry, academia, and government labs.
Governments are likely to prioritize sovereign quantum capability, advanced semiconductor manufacturing, workforce development, and supply-chain resilience, creating meaningful opportunities for quantum companies to co-develop hardware and software, participate in standards and benchmarking efforts, and deploy early systems in real-world environments. These collaborations will be critical in translating scientific leadership into durable economic and industrial advantage.
Prediction 3: Educational Ecosystem Expansion
2026 will mark a turning point for quantum education as growing student demand and clearer industry signals drive the expansion of formal quantum programs. We expect increased enrollment and a broader set of universities introducing dedicated quantum curricula, influenced by greater commercial visibility, expanding early-career pathways, and sustained government support for STEM and advanced manufacturing education.
This growth will be supported by industry-backed software platforms, open-source tools, cloud-based simulators, and hands-on partnerships with quantum companies. The resulting talent pipeline will begin to meaningfully address critical needs in quantum software engineering, semiconductor manufacturing and system design, and applied algorithm development. We also anticipate deeper collaboration between industry and academia to ensure graduates are equipped with skills that translate directly into impact across the emerging quantum technology sector.
Booz Allen
Booz Allen’s Chief Technology Office — The Future of Quantum (from JD Dulny, Quantum Practice Leader):
With quantum computers potentially emerging as early as 2029, organizations must invest in post-quantum cryptography (PQC) now to ensure U.S. infrastructure is not left vulnerable to cyberattacks. Industry collaboration and startups will be essential to producing and advancing every part of the quantum supply chain.
Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative
Charlie Brock, CEO
- Chattanooga will establish itself as the early mover for quantum business applications.More businesses across industries are going to begin considering and preparing for the quantum era in 2026. Chattanooga is the first community in the U.S. with a commercially available on-prem quantum computer and quantum network. As businesses look to take the quantum conversation out of the lab and into commercialization, Chattanooga is the best place. The region is already seeing quantum interest from the healthcare, insurance, financial services and energy sectors.
- Quantum is going to have a breakout year in 2026. Given the influx of institutional and strategic capital aimed at turning quantum research into industrial products, and analyst expectations that early adopters will capture the lion’s share of quantum value, it’s reasonable to expect that venture capital firms will not only keep funding quantum startups but will also actively encourage (and in some cases pressure) their broader portfolio companies to pilot and adopt quantum technologies in their products and workflows.
- We will start to see more inter-regional quantum ecosystem collaboration in 2026. U.S. hubs for quantum like Chicago, Colorado, South Carolina, Chattanooga, Fairfax County, VA and California will continue to work together to achieve practical applications for quantum technologies.
Nova Microsystems
Ryan Melissinos, CEO and Co-Founder
Quantum is no longer theoretical in boardrooms. In 2026, organizations will begin transitioning to PQC-ready architectures as quantum-accelerated decryption becomes a legitimate planning risk rather than a distant threat.
Safe Quantum — Toshiba
John Prisco, Toshiba consultant and CEO of Safe Quantum:
Quantum computer modalities are too numerous for any collaborative progress to be made. By the end of 2026 some of the more tenuous modalities will be abandoned. In the year ahead, the modalities that will end concentrated experimentation are topological qubits, like Majorana Qubits and Fibonacci Anyons, which are inherently more resistant to noise but still in early development and far behind the other modalities.
The next big thing for 2026 will be the advancement of quantum networks for quantum computer qubit growth (distributed quantum computers in a data center) and entanglement swapping for long distance secure networking. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) will enter the realm of PIC Chips (Photonic Integrated Circuit Chips). With the increased interest in quantum networks, there will be improvement in quantum memory with longer coherent times for storing optical information and the quantum holy grail of quantum repeaters.
Marcus Doherty, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer,
I expect quantum sensors to start delivering commercial value in 2026, as high-performance products gain traction in early markets and an accelerating wave of prototype demonstrations and deployments reveals opportunities in sectors such as biomedical and automotive.
University of Chicago
Fred Chong, a Fellow of ACM and the Seymour Goodman Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago
In 2026, I expect to see substantial advances in quantum platforms supporting fault-tolerant computation, as well as significant demonstrations of hybrid quantum-classical applications. Capitalizing on progress in 2025, we will see hardware demonstrations of more realistic applications using error correction or partial error correction with more complex operations (previous demonstrations were missing quantum rotations critical to realizing quantum advantage). An example could be a more realistic Shor’s algorithm that factors a small RSA key that is unknown at compile time (as opposed to the pre-compiled demo this year). Other examples could be in hybrid quantum-classical applications, such as those tracked in the new quantum advantage tracker or even in biomedical applications such as those in the Welcome Leap Q4Bio program.
Alice and Bob
Laurent Prost, Product Manager at Alice & Bob
The First Universal Quantum Computer, although not Fault Tolerant — “In quantum error correction, we could see the first demonstration of a fully integrated logical architecture with just a handful of noisy logical qubits but a universal gate set. This could be developed by a trapped-ion or neutral-atom platform, such as Quantinuum or Atom Computing which is working with Microsoft.
Additionally, an algorithmic breakthrough could reveal a new exponential speedup. It’s speculative, but this type of major development could matter even more than progress with hardware.”
Cecile Perrault, Head of Partnerships at Alice & Bob
Governments will Double Down on Quantum Purchase —“On the policy side, we expect a surge of procurement orders focused on fault-tolerant quantum computers and benchmarking initiatives across public labs and national research centers. There’s also a clear push toward accelerated algorithm development and the new ‘must-have’ in every national or regional strategy: tech sovereignty.”
Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech
Marta P. Estarellas, CEO of Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech.
2026 marks the beginning of true quantum industrialization. The momentum sparked by the International Year of Quantum is now turning into concrete progress: digital QPUs are advancing with more efficient error-correction codes, while analog QPUs are taking a more central role by delivering practical advantages in targeted applications and shaping the complementary multimodal architectures that future data centers will depend on. Computing is evolving toward a multimodal future where CPUs, GPUs, and digital+analog quantum acceleration work in concert: each modality amplifying the others to create a unified and sustainable computational fabric.
We may not see widespread quantum advantage yet; and that is perfectly fine. What matters now is preparing quantum technologies to enter real business workflows within the next 2–3 years, as we continue overcoming scientific and engineering challenges and scaling our architectures toward practical deployment. There is no doubt the systems will be ready soon. Now we need production, moving from innovation environments into robust operational settings, with a focus on orchestration across backends, industrial integration, and standardization. Importantly, as AI’s compute appetite surges, analog quantum computers offer a more sustainable and efficient path forward, which could deliver the first meaningful quantum-enhanced AI applications sooner than many expect. Reinventing the way we do AI with the tools quantum provides us will be, undoubtedly, key in 2026!
JPMorganChase
Scot Baldry, Group CTO
In 2026, enterprises will continue preparing in earnest for another consequential shift in technology: quantum computing. While quantum remains in its early stages, advancements in hardware and applied research are moving the technology from theory to tangible progress, with potential use cases across financial services coming into focus. Much like the early days of AI, leaders will focus first on understanding where quantum can deliver meaningful advantages — from complex portfolio optimization to new forms of cryptography and risk modeling.
At JPMorganChase, our researchers recently achieved a new milestone in quantum computing with the implementation of a quantum streaming algorithm that achieves theoretical exponential space advantage in real-time processing of large data sets. This type of forward-looking research was made possible with advancements in hardware. As we enter a new era of computing, and we expect to see similar hardware advancements across the industry in the year ahead, helping us boost what’s possible as we advance our research.
Quantum Elements
Izhar Medalsy, CEO
Quantum is going through a shift from qubit counts and hardware-focused R&D to software, simulation and middleware that enable real systems. 2026 will mark the moment when “quantum infrastructure” becomes the real battleground — because hardware alone no longer drives progress.
- AI-native simulation + digital twins will emerge as the baseline for all serious quantum hardware and cloud players. As classical AI transforms other industries, AI is already proving essential to quantum: from error-correction to noise modeling to pulse-level calibration. Recent breakthroughs in AI-based QEC and noise mitigation confirm this path.
- Quantum software engineering has become a first-class discipline. As more firms move from “lab experiments” to “real development workflows,” demand for robust quantum tooling — high-fidelity simulators, control-stack integrations, hardware-aware compilers, QEC toolchains — will evolve quickly. The vendors who build that tooling first become the infrastructure backbone for the entire industry.
- Quantum Elements’ full-stack AI-native platform will unlock dramatic acceleration — 10×–20× reduction in R&D cycles and orders-of-magnitude savings per project, making quantum engineering economically viable at scale. The barrier of “slow, expensive hardware cycles and limited qubit access” will change dramatically thanks to these software development platforms.
Long-term winners will be platform and data-layer plays, not just hardware vendors. As quantum systems proliferate, the value will aggregate in the layers that provide abstraction, reliability, and scalability — the same way CAD tools, EDA, and simulation became indispensable for classical computing and semiconductor design. Quantum Elements aims to be that foundational layer.
South Carolina Quantum
Joe Queenan, Executive Director of South Carolina Quantum Association
Internationally, early adopters in the Middle East will engage in healthy co-opetition;
In the US, for executives with use cases under their belt – quantum becomes less about experimenting and more about being part of their core infrastructure;
Regionally, the southeast’s early focus on developing quantum talent and use cases will yield exciting commercialization efforts. Early adopters will pull ahead.
Orange Business
Usman Javaid, Chief Products and Marketing Officer
Quantum computing in 2026 marks the shift from awareness to action
“In 2026, we’ll see the quantum technology ecosystem move beyond lab‑headlines into measurable enterprise progress. We anticipate quantum processors will cross the 100‑qubit mark, supporting experiments with closer‑to‑real‑world applicability. These results will help clarify where quantum computing begins to deliver advantage rather than just promise.
Meanwhile the regulatory environment will catch up, with governments and industry bodies likely to publish firmer standards around quantum‑safe cryptography, setting clearer timelines for compliance, and requiring more rigorous quantum risk assessments.
At the same time, post-quantum cryptography (PQC) solutions will begin rolling out at scale, marking the start of a new era in digital security. Organisations will increasingly adopt quantum agility, which is the ability to pivot to quantum-safe algorithms as the technology evolves. The continued expansion of quantum key distribution (QKD) networks, especially through satellite technology, will strengthen global communication resilience.
All of this will sharpen the focus on digital resilience. Quantum technologies are moving out of the fringe and into national security, economic strategy, and boardroom planning. The ‘store now, decrypt later’ threat is no longer hypothetical, it’s prompting serious timelines for action.
So no, 2026 won’t be the year quantum solves everything, but global organisations can’t risk falling further behind.”
LightSolver
The New and Surprising Role of Optical Processors in Real-World PDE Solving
Chene Tradonsky, CTO and Co-Founder of LightSolver
“In 2026, optical and photonic processors will begin to show their most practical impact in an unexpected area. Alongside their evolution as experimental accelerators for AI, they will finally move out of the lab to help solve partial differential equations (PDEs), the core mathematical work behind many of the scientific and engineering simulations that fill today’s HPC centers. These workloads are a natural match for light-based computation, and free-space optical systems are likely to be among the very first non-digital engines that major industrial players will test on real, high-value problems. This will not look like a sudden revolution in computing. It will be a gradual, steady shift as leading HPC centers plug photonic technologies into their existing simulation workflows to attack the slowest, most power-hungry PDE kernels and win back both speed and energy efficiency.”
Physics-Native Simulation Becomes Its Own Market Category
“Physics-native computing (hardware that solves equations by mimicking the physics being modeled) will emerge in 2026 as a recognized category alongside CPUs, GPUs, and quantum processors. The demand is being driven by industries like aerospace, automotive, climate modeling, and chip design drowning in partial differential equation (PDE) workloads which need faster turnaround without exponentially increasing energy use. These platforms will gain traction not only because they mimic physics, but because they are highly programmable devices. This flexibility allows the same hardware to be rapidly reconfigured to tackle many different types of problems, rather than being limited to a single narrow use case. As research prototypes mature, early commercial free-space optical systems using light, nonlinear materials or coupled oscillators will demonstrate that they can handle specific classes of PDEs in constant or near-constant time. This will push simulation teams to rethink their toolchains, blending traditional solvers with specialized hardware in a hybrid approach that delivers both speed and sustainability.”
SAS‘ 2026 Predictions
Bill Wisotsky, Principal Quantum Systems Architect
SAS execs and tech-sperts say 2026 will be a year of significant changes and movements in quantum. Expect to see big advances in hardware especially around qubit counts, connectivity and error correction and on the business side, the coalescing of quantum vendors as mergers and acquisitions increase. Both governments and private corporations will increase spending on quantum technology and resources, seeking short-term quantum advantages (e.g., tangible results). The long-term advantage? Owning IP for “build now, use later.”
Amy Stout, Head of Quantum Product Strategy
In 2026, the quantum market will heat up considerably as hopes rise that the technology will mature to early-stage value by 2030. Most investors will broaden their scope from hardware and post-quantum cryptography to a greater emphasis on software and applications. Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for the phrase ‘quantum architecture’: it encompasses the full stack of a quantum system, including the software and application layers that drive real-world quantum value. Expect to see hiring ramp up for in-house expertise to drive toward this future.
Lastwall
Karl Holmqvist, Founder and CEO
Intensifying “Steal-Now, Decrypt-Later” Threats Spur Urgent Migration to Post-Quantum Encryption.
In 2026, the timeline for quantum-enabled attacks will shrink dramatically, pressuring organizations to expedite their adoption of post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Breakthroughs in quantum computing, such as recent leaps in quantum processor power and the corresponding multi-billion dollar buildouts that are underway, underscore that a cryptography-breaking machine may arrive sooner than expected. We expect a sharp increase in quantum security spending in 2026 as deadlines for PQC migration become real and the understanding of intensifying “harvest-now, decrypt-later” espionage campaigns proliferates. Governments worldwide have launched quantum-safe initiatives and set clear timelines: for example, U.S. federal agencies face mandates to inventory and replace vulnerable encryption within the decade. With the 2024 standardization (FIPS 203) clearing the path for deployment, 2026 will see organizations scrambling to start the overhaul of their cryptographic infrastructure.
Thales
Chris Harris, EMEA Technical Director
A ‘wrecking ball moment’ will spur rapid enterprise progress on Post-Quantum Cryptography.
Much like the remote working mandates from Covid forced video conferencing software to improve very quickly, we’ll see similar with preparations to transition to PQC. A moment of urgency, such as exposure of ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ efforts, or even a major quantum attack, will provoke action to speed up PQC adoption by enterprises beyond those already putting resources behind it, such as the finance sector. Every vendor in a software supply chain will need to create a cryptographic Bill-of-Materials for their applications and provide proof of PQC adoption. As momentum increases, existing crypto-management platforms may evolve into full quantum-safe services, automating how organisations transition between encryption algorithms as new threats emerge.
SandboxAQ
Luca Ferrara, General Manager of Navigation at SandboxAQ, on trends reshaping the future of PNT:
Luca Ferrara oversees the development of SandboxAQ’s quantum-based magnetic anomaly navigation system, AQNav, that enables safe, accurate, and uninterrupted geospatial navigation for military, government, and commercial applications. He is available for further commentary or a deeper dive into his following 2026 predictions regarding GPS disruption and the methods that are underway to ensure safer navigation worldwide.
“We’re seeing a strategic shift from reliance on GPS to layered navigation architectures built for disruption.”
“The operational environment now assumes GPS denial as a baseline threat, not a rare edge case. In response, defense and aviation sectors are prioritizing multi-modal navigation—especially systems that are passive, terrain-agnostic, and less susceptible to spoofing or jamming.”
“The magnetic field offers one of the few global signals that adversaries can’t degrade or imitate.”
“Unlike satellite signals, Earth’s magnetic field isn’t vulnerable to the same forms of interference. That makes it a compelling layer in resilient PNT strategies, especially when paired with onboard sensing and AI to interpret environmental data in real time. 2026 and beyond will see a dramatic increase in the use of MagNav technology for various military and commercial transportation use cases”
“2026 will likely be the inflection point for operational adoption of quantum sensing in navigation.”
“Until recently, quantum sensors were viewed as lab-bound or too complex for field use. That’s changing quickly. As these systems mature and integrate into real-world platforms, their ability to deliver high-fidelity data in passive mode becomes a key differentiator.”
“Resilient navigation is foundational—not just for military missions, but for the infrastructure of autonomy and logistics.”
“Whether it’s drones, supply chains, or emergency response, position assurance under duress is essential. That requires rethinking navigation as a system-of-systems—drawing from magnetic, inertial, optical, and AI-enhanced sources rather than any single point of failure.”
Glocomms
Giancarlo Hirsch, Managing Director at global tech talent partner
In 2026, the tech industry is set to hit a turning point as quantum computing shifts from experimental to commercially relevant applications. Increased investment and breakthroughs in these areas will continue reshaping product development, cybersecurity, and data processing capabilities, which is exciting and entirely dependent on securing the right talent.
The surge in innovation will infiltrate the broader tech ecosystem, moving from the lab to the field, across leading industries such as manufacturing, energy, finance, and healthcare. This will open new opportunities for collaboration, commercialization, and gaining a competitive edge. The most cutting-edge companies are already investing in high-performance computing centers or gaining access to high-performance systems to start this transition. If they haven’t already, companies should focus on securing experts in quantum algorithms, AI research, and hybrid AI-quantum systems, as well as engineers with extremely strong computer science fundamentals who can translate breakthroughs into scalable solutions.
In the new year and beyond, companies will struggle to find individuals with the specific skill sets mentioned above who can also combine those skills with the essential deep domain knowledge needed to implement new technology in the field. The most sought-after talent will be those capable of ensuring that cutting-edge research turns into real-world applications, positioning themselves to benefit from the next generation of technological innovation.
I predict this to be the most under-brokered aspect of the tech talent marketplace for the upcoming years. Candidates with strong tech skills must home in on business applications so their technological solutions can be seamlessly communicated to business stakeholders and operational leaders.
