As 2025 just has hours remaining and New Year festivities are revving up, it’s time for the traditional peering into the dropping crystal ball to discern what 2026 might hold.
First, let’s take a look at how we fared with last year’s predictions.
We would probably give ourselves an A-. We were spot on in some categories — and a little off in others. We had our share of those “we-completely-did-not-see-that-coming” moments, too
We correctly anticipated the acceleration of logical-qubit research led by Microsoft, Quantinuum and Atom Computing; the tightening of valuations as public and private quantum bubbles deflated a bit; the growing role of AI as both a catalyst for quantum research and a source of investor fatigue that nudged capital toward deep-tech alternatives; and the sharp rise in geopolitical maneuvering around quantum capabilities.
We also called the surge in interest in quantum sensing and timing, as well as the broader convergence narrative that pushed quantum deeper into policy and business conversations. The big miss was the expectation of multiple new quantum IPOs — while several companies moved into pre-IPO positioning, the public-market window remained cooler than forecast.
So, now, what do we see in 2026?
Generally speaking, as the quantum industry enters 2026 we see that the headwinds — and tailwinds — of sharper competition, faster technical progress and a more sober understanding of what “advantage” really means will continue to influence the speed and navigation of this complex terrain.. Also, while many of the forces that shaped 2025 continue into the new year — rising geopolitical stakes, intensifying AI convergence, and the relentless pursuit of logical qubits — the underlying dynamics will shift.
This year is likely to feature a blend of acceleration and recalibration: faster breakthroughs, cooler funding rounds, more strategic acquisitions and a deeper focus on hybrid architectures that bridge quantum with classical supercomputing.
Below is our annual assessment of what to expect in the year ahead.
Technological Progress Accelerates — Fueled by Competitive Pressure
2026 is likely to challenge long-held assumptions about the pace of quantum research. The major players — particularly IBM, Google, Quantinuum, Atom Computing, Microsoft, QuEra and a handful of fast-rising European and Japanese teams — are in the midst of a quiet arms race. The competition is not only for system performance, but also for the ability to demonstrate new classes of logical operations, achieve longer coherence times and generate larger, higher-fidelity entangled states.
That competitive energy matters. It compresses timelines. And it suggests that 2026 could be the fastest-moving year yet for quantum hardware, especially in error correction.
Logical qubits are the main driver.
The field is still many steps away from fault tolerance, but the recent drop in the number of physical qubits required to build a single high-quality logical qubit is creating momentum. The most likely advances in 2026 fall into three categories:
- Larger logical qubit demonstrations, especially with geometric codes and bosonic encodings.
- Continued reduction in overhead, with several teams aiming for sub-100 physical qubits per logical qubit.
- Hardware–software co-design, particularly the integration of AI-driven decoders into real-time control systems.
The competitive spirit across the sector means one thing: announcements will continue. Some will be significant and others incremental.
Word of caution. While it’s impossible to truly predict any paradigm-shifting, roadmap shortening breakthroughs, competitive pressure may mean that advances are marketed more aggressively than the underlying data justifies.
But the overall trend is that we should not expect 2026 to be a quiet year for quantum hardware.
More Announcements Claiming Quantum Advantage (But Still Limited and Mostly Non-Commercial)
Just as expected in 2025, quantum advantage is inching forward, but still with caveats.
In 2026, we expect several things to happen in the quest for advantage. There will be more “scientific advantage” announcements, meaning speedups relevant to specific physics, chemistry or optimization tasks. Also, the industry should expect more “regime-specific” results, in other words, announcements where quantum outperforms classical under narrow conditions, but not enough to reshape entire industries. Finally, look for an uptick in hybrid demonstrations, especially in chemical simulation, materials design and logistics scheduling.
But the key qualifier remains unchanged. We don’t expect these advances to be commercially transformative this year. They will appear in research labs, national labs, hyperscaler HPC centers and closed-door industry collaborations. They will showcase what quantum can do when conditions are carefully prepared. But they will not represent broad industrial advantage, nor will they dethrone GPUs or exascale machines.
Instead, 2026 will deepen the stratification of “advantage categories”. We should expect to see proof-of-principle, application-specific advantage and potentially utility-scale advantage (at least feasibility-stage findings0.
The industry should expect a year filled with announcements — some modest, some bold, a few credible — but all largely restricted to scientific or algorithmic domains rather than enterprise workloads.
Hybrid Quantum–HPC Environments Become the Dominant Architecture
If 2025 was the year hybrid approaches became “interesting,” 2026 will be the year they become the default. The major cloud providers, national labs and hardware companies are converging on the same architectural conclusion that the next decade belongs to heterogeneous compute.
No human is an island, and no quantum computers will operate in isolation. They will operate inside HPC Centers, alongside GPU clusters, within high-bandwidth orchestration layers and nestled in with AI systems that are managing workflows, compilation and resource allocation.
Next year, expect those hybrid needs to drive more partnerships. It won’t be just company partnerships — ecosystem, national and global industrial collaborations will be needed. Countries developing quantum-HPC hubs, including the U.S., Japan, France and Germany, will align their efforts as quantum capability becomes tied to supercomputing demand. Similar pressure might push collaboration between quantum firms and GPU manufacturers, where AI acceleration now overlaps with simulation workloads. Cloud AI platforms will also continue to emerge as partners, especially in areas like molecular and materials modeling that increasingly require quantum methods alongside classical tools.
This trend will subtly — or not so subtly — reshape software. Companies that once focused on purely quantum algorithms are broadening into workflow automation, error mitigation, and GPU-accelerated quantum simulation — the connective layers that make hybrid compute viable.
Think Modular
New technologies are often shaped by skeuomorphism, in which early systems deliberately imitate the form or conventions of what came before. In quantum computing, that influence shows up in how the machines are commonly envisioned and developed through the lens of classical computers, both in form and function. Quantum computers are typically pictured as large, monolithic boxes, with performance gains assumed to come from making those boxes bigger — much as desktop computers gave way to supercomputers and rows of supercomputers.
But quantum systems operate under different physical and engineering constraints. Rather than scaling a single machine indefinitely, modular architectures — which network smaller quantum processors together — offer an alternative path to higher performance without simply building a “better box.”
As a result, modular designs are likely to emerge as a parallel route to practical quantum computing, potentially enabling real-world applications sooner rather than later.
The Quantum ‘Brain Chain’ Becomes a Bottleneck
Quantum ecosystems have spent years mapping supply chains and value chains, from materials and fabrication to software and end users. In 2025, attention will shift to a quieter constraint: what we’re going to dub the brain chain — the flow of skilled people required to design, build, operate, and commercialize these systems.
As quantum projects move from laboratories into manufacturing, deployment and early customer environments, the limiting factor will increasingly be talent rather than hardware. Every step in the supply and value chain requires specialized workers, from cryogenic engineers and photonics technicians to systems integrators, sales engineers and policy-literate managers. Ecosystems that are geographically or institutionally cohesive — whether local, regional, or national — will be better positioned to coordinate this demand, align training with real jobs, and keep talent circulating within the system.
This year, the pressure to find and retain quantum-capable workers will force leaders to think more creatively. That will include faster, more targeted training programs; clearer signaling of career paths beyond PhDs; closer ties between industry and education; and the routine use of AI tools as junior assistants to extend the productivity of scarce human expertise. The ecosystems that treat talent as infrastructure — not an afterthought — will move faster than those that do not.
Mergers and Acquisitions Heat Up
After two years of steady funding and technical progress, the industry may be entering a consolidation phase. There are too many companies chasing a limited pool of customers, and the highest-value IP — control electronics, photonics, cryogenics, error correction, and neutral-atom subsystems — is becoming strategically scarce.
We see four forces will drive M&A in 2026:
- Large tech companies looking to own critical quantum technologies rather than license them indefinitely.
- National leaders securing domestic supply chains, especially in Europe and East Asia.
- Private companies seeking scale in a market where standalone survival is increasingly difficult.
- Partnerships that are entwined so thoroughly that it makes more sense to establish permanent connections.
Expect acquisitions in businesses, such as cryogenic subsystems, laser and photonics suppliers, quantum networking hardware, compilers and software toolchains and early-stage quantum sensor companies
Don’t read into these M & A moves as a portent of major industry moves — positive or negative. Consolidations are a natural consequence of a maturing market — still early, still high-risk, but no longer a field of unbounded expansion.
2026 is likely to produce several headline-making deals across three continents. This is the wild card: One of the tech mega scalers may go big on quantum, buying a quantum startup or startups. Potentially, we may even see a mega scaler acquiring a big player in quantum.
Funding Cools — Particularly the Mega-Rounds
The last few years we have seen an uptick in funding rounds, including large nine-figure quantum raises. 2025 extended the trend, with record-setting rounds. But there are limits and those limits might become clear in 2025. There are a finite number of quantum companies with demonstrable revenue, credible roadmaps, scaling paths, or sufficiently unique IP to justify the volume of capital deployed. Many of the companies received funding in 2025.
In 2026, we expect to see fewer large rounds — those in the $200 million to $1 billion range — but we expect to see more mid-range ($40 million to $80 million). We are likely to see more strategic investment rather than pure venture investment and more government-matched or government-anchored financing.
Corporate investment will be flowing from hyperscalers, defense primes and industrial conglomerates
Importantly, this is not a downturn. It is a recalibration of sorts. Capital remains available, but the era of “mega-round by default” is easing.
More Quantum Companies Go Public, But The Market Becomes More Crowded
The pipeline for public listings will grow in 2026. Several of the industry’s most mature companies have already signaled readiness or begun assembling governance structures suited for public markets.
But this comes with a tradeoff.
As more quantum companies list, investor diversification across the sector increases, which could dilute enthusiasm for any single company and flatten valuation spikes. The trend could also broaden ETF and index exposure, while reducing the volatility that previously defined the space.
This might be good news. It might be bad news, too. But it’s healthy and inevitable. The early quantum public market relied heavily on a small handful of stocks. That scarcity inflated both risk and return.
A larger, more diversified quantum basket changes the dynamic. It creates more stability, but also distributes investor attention and capital across a wider field.
AI–Quantum Convergence Deepens and Defines the Decade
2025 confirmed that AI will accelerate quantum progress. In 2026, that relationship becomes more bidirectional and more formalized.
Three forces stand out:
- AI-assisted quantum error correction will become a mainstream field.
- Quantum-enhanced AI models become active research topics, especially in sampling, generative chemistry and irregular computation domains that GPUs struggle with.
- Quantum simulation becomes an AI workload, not just a physics workload.
The industries most influenced by the convergence are likely to be drug discovery, materials science, climate and weather modeling, logistics and supply chain and microelectronics and photonics design In these sectors, the workflows are hybrid in nature, and edge cases often dominate.
The quantum–AI link does not need to be universal to be valuable — it just needs to be superior in specific, high-value tasks.
Geopolitics Tighten
Quantum is no longer viewed as solely a research field. It is a national capability. And in 2026, the geopolitical posture around quantum intensifies further.
It won’t be difficult to predict how these geopolitical tensions will manifest. Governments will demand more export controls, especially in quantum sensors and error-corrected systems, and provide more domestic incentives.
We may see a further uptick in national lab–industry partnerships and an increase in competition for talenr, especially across the U.S., Europe, China, Japan, South Korea and the Middle East.
Quantum Sensing and Timing Continue Their Commercial Rise
In 2025, when we discussed “quantum” we overwhelmingly meant quantum computing.
That will start to change.
While we expect the element of “cool” to push quantum computing as the recipient of most of the public attention, quantum sensing will pick up attention, especially because it is arguably the most commercially mature segment.
In 2026, we expect:
- More deployments in navigation, mining, medical imaging, energy and defense.
- More regulatory frameworks for safety-critical sensing systems.
- More integration with classical systems, especially for GPS augmentation and subterranean mapping.
Sensing is one of the few quantum technologies that consistently generates revenue today. That will remain true. And 2026 may be the year the industry finally recognizes it.
Quantum Convergence Drives Broader Awareness And Pushback
The convergence of quantum with AI, materials science, finance, climate modeling and industrial simulation is reshaping how non-specialists think about the technology.
But convergence brings expectations. Expectations bring hype. And hype brings both momentum and resistance.
2026 will see an increase in industry interest, particularly from energy, aerospace, pharmaceuticals and advanced manufacturing. But, we will also see more skepticism, especially from corporate technology teams burned by previous hype cycles. Adoption will likely increase and it will bring in new clients from new industries and from businesses that are smaller than the large corporates and megascalers that currently form its commercial backbone.
Look for that influx of new blood (and brains) to drive more innovation as these interdisciplinary teams learn how to fit quantum into larger architectures and more diverse workflows .
