10x and the Q-Day question
This Sunday think piece examines the warning that quantum risk to Bitcoin could arrive before commercial quantum viability. It separates that warning
Episode archive
Search every episode. Look up a company, a device, a paper, or a claim and read what the show said the day it landed.
79 episodes
Weekly Recap: From Logical Qubits to Field-Ready Sensors
This week's recap follows quantum computing from a commercial logical-qubit milestone and a topological gate demonstration to a DOE roadmap and new re
IonQ’s Campus Installation Is Still a 2027 Promise
IonQ's planned Superion 256 installation at Florida International University puts the promise and limits of on-campus quantum access in focus. Also: Q
Who Gets the First Quantum Seat at NVIDIA?
NVIDIA selected IonQ's Superion 256 for its first planned on-premise quantum installation at the Accelerated Quantum Research Center. Today's episode
QuEra Crays Up, Microsoft Hands DARPA 15,000 Sq Ft of Proof
QuEra and HPE plan on-premises neutral-atom QPUs with Cray supercomputers while Microsoft opens a 15,000-square-foot Maryland center giving DARPA hand
IonQ's Korea Stack Bet Plus RSA-260 at $400k
IonQ bundles a Superion 256 and SiV memory with SDT and a planned Gumi facility, plus a classical RSA-260 claim, and Phasecraft's Virginia move. IonQ
Quantum assist inside crash simulation, Swiss post-quantum chip plan
A Swiss post-quantum chip MoU, a D-Wave board move, a Chicago reality-check, and IonQ-Ansys in LS-DYNA. SEALSQ, WISeKey and Jura Sign MoU for Swiss Po
The Week Quantum Money Got Real — And Real Small
The weekly recap: PsiQuantum's CHIPS Act award goes final, a new benchmark humbles the whole industry, DOE launches a $215 million fault-tolerance pri
Washington's Quantum Moonshot Bets on Physics Meeting a Deadline
DOE launches a milestone-based prize race toward fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2028 — plus surface-code scaling on IBM hardware, a real-world Io
Quantum's TSMC Problem: IBM's $1B Foundry, No Customers
Today: IBM's quantum foundry spinout Anderon finalizes a $1 billion CHIPS Act award, matched by IBM, to build a neutral wafer fab for the industry — b
IonQ vs. Rigetti: Trapped Ions or Speed to Useful Quantum?
IonQ and Rigetti Computing get put head-to-head on accuracy versus speed, Beijing rolls out a quantum-industry matchmaking program, Silicon Quantum Co
Quantum's 100,000x Gap to Real Science
A new cross-vendor benchmark called QUOPS gives quantum computing its first apples-to-apples yardstick for progress — and finds current machines need
Fortaegis Bets $50M That Security Lives in the Chip, Not the Code
Today: a Dutch security startup raises fifty million dollars betting that silicon fingerprints beat software cryptography in the quantum era, plus NVI
Uncle Sam as Shareholder: Smart Bet or Bubble Backstop?
A Sunday think piece: Washington has quietly become a shareholder in nine quantum computing companies through CHIPS Act equity deals. We dig into Rige
Washington Buys a Stake in the Quantum Race
This week's recap: Washington took minority equity stakes in D-Wave, Rigetti, and Quantinuum as part of a $300 million CHIPS Act funding push, IonQ us
An Open Leaderboard Just Undercut Google's Bitcoin-Cracking Math
An open, crowdsourced contest of humans and AI agents claims it cut the estimated quantum cost of a key Bitcoin-cracking step by 86%, undercutting a G
IonQ's Bitcoin-Cracking Math: Real Physics, Marketing Slide
IonQ puts a precise number on breaking Bitcoin's encryption — and we check the hype against the roadmap. Plus IQM's staged path to logical qubits in F
Washington Owns $300M of Quantum Rivals; IonQ Bets $1.8B on Its Own Fab
Two ways to solve the same quantum manufacturing bottleneck: Washington takes equity in three rival hardware companies via a $300M CHIPS Act deal, whi
NEC Exits Its Quantum Hardware Program as Fujitsu Bets on Diamond Spin
NEC has quietly stepped back from building its own superconducting quantum computer, citing an ROI timeline too long to justify the capital — while cr
NEC Walks Away From Quantum Hardware
NEC, the company behind the world's first superconducting qubit demonstration in 1999, has halted development of quantum computer hardware — while con
Physics or Plumbing: What's Actually Blocking Quantum Computing?
A Sunday think piece on IBM veteran and ERVA co-chair Brian Gaucher's claim that quantum computing's real bottleneck has shifted from physics to engin
The Week in Quantum: Foundries, MOUs, and a Nasdaq Pop
This week's recap: an infrastructure-and-institutions week for quantum, from IBM's faster Nighthawk r2 chip and PsiQuantum's algorithm-development dea
IBM's Speed Record: Real Fix or Self-Graded Exam?
IBM claims a 25x circuit-throughput leap on its Nighthawk r2 chip without adding a single qubit — we ask whether that's real progress or a self-graded
100,000 Circuits a Second: IBM's Speed Bet
IBM's Nighthawk r2 claims a twenty-five-fold jump in quantum circuit throughput via a redesigned reset architecture — we dig into whether that speed a
The Backup Copy Problem: Quantum Computing's Oldest Fix
A quiet news day sends Brian back to first principles: why quantum computers can't just back up their data the way classical computers do, and how a 2
Pasqal Goes Public: Can France's Quantum Bet Deliver?
Pasqal's Nasdaq debut anchors France's quantum month, but the numbers behind it deserve their own look — plus AI-sped qubit calibration, a trapped-ion
Quantum's SPAC Boom Meets a Real Court Loss
This week's recap: Pasqal's Nasdaq debut, Canada's massive bet on Xanadu, an Italian court dealing IBM a legal setback, crypto's growing quantum anxie
IBM Buys a Rival Qubit's Home Lab
IBM has completed its acquisition of HRL Laboratories, pulling silicon-spin qubit expertise into a company that built its whole roadmap on superconduc
Dead and Alive: Quantum Computing's Credibility Gap
Bloomberg's Mark Bergen asks whether quantum computing is finally arriving or still running on hype — real fidelity gains from Quantinuum and IonQ and
Quantum Codebreaking Debate Heats Up: NSF's Big Bet, Caltech's AI
Linked sources: NSF Invests $290M in Eight Quantum Research Institutes — NSF.gov Linked sources: Princeton to Lead Major Federally Funded Quantum Inst
Japan Flips the Switch on a Full-Stack Neutral-Atom Machine
Japan's Institute for Molecular Science says its full-stack neutral-atom quantum computer, Shunkai, is operational — but the hard error-correction pro
Weekly Recap: 70 Logical Qubits and the $2 Trillion Question
This week's recap: IBM and UChicago's 70-logical-qubit 'trusted' quantum advantage claim collides with a growing replication-crisis debate, while Broo
Caltech's Quantum Sim Nails a 40-Year-Old Physics Call
Caltech says its team used a neutral-atom quantum simulator to directly measure forty-year-old conformal field theory predictions for the first time,
Cornell's Krypton Fix: Tantalum Heat Drops From 400°C to 200°C
Cornell engineers swap argon for krypton gas and cut tantalum qubit deposition temperature from over 400°C to 200°C — a fabrication fix that could mat
IBM's Cooling Milestone: Progress or Roadmap Theater?
IBM connects its first two modular cryogenic systems on the road to its 2029 Quantum Starling machine — real engineering, but does it retire the harde
The Cross-Check: Quantum Advantage Gets a Rival's Stamp
Today's lead: an IBM/Qedma/RIKEN/BlueQubit quantum magnetism result gets cross-validated on Quantinuum's rival hardware, raising the bar for what coun
Frolov vs. Microsoft: Quantum's Replication Crisis
Today's episode digs into a New Scientist feature revisiting Sergey Frolov's Science paper on failed Majorana zero-mode replications — physics central
The 2018 Verdict Still Haunting Quantum Machine Learning
This week a KAIST team showed that bound entanglement — real, provable quantum correlation that can't be distilled into clean entangled pairs — can't
Weekly Recap: Quantinuum's Breakout Week Steals the Show
The weekly recap: Quantinuum's record earnings and Oracle Cloud deal send the stock soaring, Infleqtion and IonQ post strong quarters while D-Wave, Ri
Oracle Bets on Quantinuum: Cloud Quantum's Real Test
Quantinuum's first earnings report as a public company landed alongside a multiyear Oracle Cloud Infrastructure partnership, sending shares up roughly
Quantum's Cloud Moment: Infrastructure or Just Real Estate?
Quantinuum's Helios trapped-ion computer is moving into an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure data center under a new multi-year deal — the show's main story
Quantinuum's 279% Number, and the $597M Loss Underneath It
Quantinuum's first earnings report as a public company pairs a 279% revenue jump against a $597M GAAP loss, alongside a new Oracle Cloud Infrastructur
Four Atoms, One Chip: Pasqal's Bid to Fix Quantum's Scaling Wall
Pasqal says it trapped rubidium atoms using laser light routed entirely through a photonic chip, a possible fix for neutral-atom computing's free-spac
Congress Eyes $567 Million Quantum Defense Bump
Congress is moving to raise military quantum spending 68% to $567 million, with the same firms benefiting from doubled lobbying and political ties to
Uncloneable Encryption Grows Up: From One Bit to Real Messages
This Sunday's think piece takes on quantum cryptography's strangest promise: uncloneable encryption, which uses the no-cloning theorem to make copying
Weekly Recap: Quantum's Advantage Claim and a $1.8 Billion Bet
The week that was: IBM stakes a claim to a quantum 'advantage era' as critics question the framing, IonQ and D-Wave post record bookings alongside rec
Did Amazon Just Find a Crack in Post-Quantum Crypto?
An AWS cryptographer's preliminary quantum algorithm takes aim at the lattice math behind post-quantum encryption, while IonQ's earnings spook investo
Microsoft's Quantum Chief Doesn't Care Who Doubts Him
IonQ posts a record quarter and raises guidance, D-Wave claims a tenfold path to lower quantum error rates, NIST sends entangled photons across ordina
IonQ's Third MOU in Five Days: Moat or Marketing?
IonQ signs its third government-and-industry MOU in five days, this time with Sandia National Laboratories, prompting a hard look at whether the patte
Oratomic's $300M Bet: Do 10,000 Qubits Beat Millions?
Caltech and the neutral-atom startup Oratomic unveiled new 'mitten' quantum error-correction codes today, reigniting the debate over whether cryptogra
China's Quantum Standards Play Meets the West's Chokepoint Strategy
Two co-leads on the same quantum geopolitics fight: China stands up a national quantum standards committee modeled on its 5G playbook, while a new IIS
The Werner-State Race: AI, Humans, and One Open Problem
Three independent teams solved a famous twenty-year-old open problem in quantum information theory — the two-copy distillability of Werner states — wi
Weekly Recap: Does IBM's Advantage Claim Actually Hold Up?
The weekly recap: IBM and the University of Chicago claim a verified quantum advantage while longtime skeptic Gil Kalai makes his case for why noise c
IBM's Quantum Advantage Papers Face the Trust Test
IBM and a coalition of research partners published three peer-reviewed papers claiming 'trusted' quantum advantage — with open circuits for anyone to
IBM's Triple Quantum Advantage Claim Faces the Tracker
IBM rolls out three coordinated quantum advantage demonstrations — with Algorithmiq, the University of Chicago, and Qedma — and opens them to public,
HRL's 18-Qubit Chip Corrects Its Own Errors
HRL Laboratories published a Nature paper showing an 18-qubit silicon processor that ran error correction entirely on its own, using a cryogenic contr
AT&T's Quantum Speedup: One Hour to Fifteen Seconds
AT&T expands its commercial deal with D-Wave after quantum annealing hardware reportedly cut a network optimization workload from an hour to under fif
Multiverse's $570M Round: Quantum Cred or AI Hype?
Multiverse Computing just closed one of the biggest funding rounds ever for a company with 'quantum' in its story — $570 million at a $1.7 billion pre
Who Owns a Quantum Algorithm?
This Sunday's think piece asks a question the IBM-HRL headlines skipped: can you actually patent a quantum algorithm? We trace the acquisition's eleve
Weekly Recap: IBM's Crash Meets Its Quantum Gambit
This week's recap: IBM's historic stock crash collides with its biggest quantum acquisition in years, DARPA and DOE keep funding unproven architecture
IBM's Second Qubit Bet: Buying HRL Labs
IBM makes its biggest quantum strategy shift in years, acquiring Boeing and GM's HRL Laboratories to run silicon spin qubits alongside its superconduc
IBM's $10B Quantum Bet Adds HRL Labs
IBM adds Boeing and GM's spin-qubit lab HRL Laboratories to its quantum arsenal, a move that hedges its superconducting bet as part of its $10 billion
Hewlett Foundation's $100 Million Bet on Quantum Security
The Hewlett Foundation commits $100 million over five years to security research across AI, biotech, and quantum computing, landing the same week the
Google's Self-Calibrating Qubits: A Live 31% Error Cut
Google Quantum AI and DeepMind show a reinforcement-learning agent can recalibrate a quantum chip's controls live, mid-error-correction — cutting logi
Britain's Quantum Gamble Meets a New Prime Minister's Axe
Britain's tech sector erupts as new PM Andy Burnham reportedly moves to dissolve the department that funds UK quantum research — plus a rack-mounted C
The NISQ Trap: Was Quantum Advantage Doomed From the Start?
This week a philosopher of physics and one of quantum computing's most influential complexity theorists went head-to-head over whether eight years of
IBM's 25% Plunge Meets Quantinuum's Anyon Breakthrough
This week's recap: Quantinuum published a genuine Nature-verified first — a universal gate set built from braiding anyons — the same week IBM posted i
IBM's $67 Billion Wipeout — and Its $10B Quantum Bet
IBM's worst single trading day in over a century collides with its long-term quantum bet, while quantum stocks give back post-executive-order gains an
Quantinuum's Anyon Fusion Trick Chases Universal Quantum Gates
Quantinuum's H2 trapped-ion processor prepares a 54-qubit non-Abelian topological state and shows that fusing anyons, not just braiding them, unlocks
Ep 10: IBM's $10 Billion Quantum Bet Survives a 25% Stock Drop
IBM reaffirms its $10 billion, five-year quantum roadmap and 2029 fault-tolerance target in the same letter admitting a rough Q2 miss and a 25% stock
Ep 9: Can an Ordinary Chip Factory Build a Quantum Computer?
Diraq and imec show eight coherent silicon spin qubits made on a standard 300mm chip foundry line — a real manufacturing milestone with an aggressive
Ep 8: Israel's $5 Billion Quantum SPAC Bet
Two of Israel's best-funded quantum startups, Quantum Art and Classiq, are reportedly in advanced SPAC talks worth up to $5 billion each — we dig into
Ep 7: Is Quantum's $12.6B Boom a Bubble or a Breakthrough?
Sunday think piece: is quantum computing's investment boom a bubble or a genuine commercial tipping point? We put IQM's Nasdaq listing and prospectus
Ep 6: The Week Quantum Became a $2 Billion Bet on Industrial Policy
This week, quantum computing fully collided with Wall Street and Washington: IQM's Nasdaq debut, a $2 billion CHIPS Act incentive package for nine com
Ep 5: Oratomic's $300M Bet That Fault Tolerance Needs 10,000 Qubits, Not Millions
Oratomic just raised $300 million on a bet that fault-tolerant quantum computing needs roughly 10,000 qubits instead of millions — plus Google teaches
Ep 4: Google's Self-Calibrating Willow Chip Hits a New Error Record
Google Quantum AI's Nature paper on a self-calibrating Willow chip headlines today's episode, alongside foundry-scaled silicon qubits, mechanical quan
Ep 3: Quantum's Next Leap: Real Physics or Just a Really Good Pitch?
A $300 million Series A bets that fault-tolerant quantum computing needs far fewer qubits than assumed — plus IBM's fusion-materials stock pop, IonQ's
Ep 2: IBM Tells Washington It's Thinking Too Small on Quantum
The White House holds its first Summit on Quantum Innovation today, and IBM lands a report the same morning warning governments not to think too narro
Ep 1: Fusion, FLiBe, and a $12.6 Billion Quantum Funding Flip
Today's episode covers a wave of quantum funding news — Qolab's $54.2M Series B, McKinsey's data showing private capital swamping government funding,