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TL;DR: Quantum computing is riding a wave of recent breakthroughs that could let it solve problems too complex for classical computers in areas like drug discovery, battery design, and even climate change. Several quantum technology companies have gone public recently, but useful quantum machines may still be a few years away—and when they arrive, they could crack the encryption underpinning everything from crypto to iMessage.

What happened: It’s 2029. The encryption protecting your online bank account just got cracked—and so did everyone else’s. That scenario is still hypothetical, but potentially less so than it used to be, thanks to a rapidly developing space called quantum computing that could upend encryption, drug discovery, materials science, and more.

Quantum computing has seen a lot of breakthroughs in the last few years, especially ones that help correct the errors that plague it. The problem is that quantum systems are extremely fragile, and until now every qubit—the quantum equivalent of a classical computer’s bit—tended to introduce more “noise” that then introduced more errors. In December 2024, Google announced that its Willow chip crossed a critical threshold where adding more qubits actually reduced errors rather than increasing them, which was a milestone researchers had chased for decades.

Microsoft followed with Majorana 1 last year, a chip built on an entirely new type of qubit architecture. The company says it enables quantum systems that could potentially scale to a million qubits, which could help tackle real-world problems like breaking down microplastics and creating self-healing materials that could repair bridges.

Why this matters: Classical computers process information as bits—either ones or zeros. Quantum computers use qubits, which can use superposition (yes, of Schrödinger’s cat fame) to exist in multiple states at once—both ones and zeros at the same time. This lets them test enormous numbers of possibilities in parallel. Google’s Willow chip, for example, ran a benchmark in under five minutes that would take one of the world’s fastest classical supercomputers longer than the age of the universe to do.

Who’s in and who’s out: Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon have all been building quantum chips in their own labs and are already selling cloud access to quantum hardware. (Apple seems to be sitting this one out.)

You probably shouldn't clear your desk just yet—the day individuals have quantum computers at home may be decades away, not least because they currently look like giant gold-plated chandeliers befitting a Bond villain’s lair. But Wall Street has definitely noticed the hype. Several quantum firms have gone public so far this year; BlackRock has been a major investor in the space, while private equity funding hit $3.77 billion in the first nine months of 2025. The CEO of Infleqtion, one of the biggest companies in this space, recently claimed the company was “following in the footsteps of Nvidia.” (Many of these firms also have names that sound like rejected Star Trek planets—Xanadu, Infleqtion, Rigetti.)

The skeleton key problem: Unfortunately, with great power comes great security vulnerabilities. Google warned last week that quantum computers could crack most existing encryption by 2029—the same encryption protecting your bank account, your medical records, and every password you've ever saved. Experts’ timelines for when this could happen range from the 2030s to the 2050s, and the security world calls it “Q-Day,” this decade's version of Y2K.

Bottom line: Quantum computing has the potential to speed up technological advancement in a lot of sectors. It’s already starting to overlap with AI: Researchers, for example, have run AI models on quantum hardware with just a few qubits—and found they could match the accuracy of the same models running on traditional computers. But it comes with major risks, too, and when exactly we’ll see all this potential come to fruition is still uncertain. —WK