# Quantum Computing Sector Quantum computing in 2026 is a pre-revenue industry trading at bubble multiples, kept aloft by genuine scientific progress, national-security anxiety, and a federal government that has started taking equity stakes in its champions. No company has demonstrated a commercially decisive application — yet the US, China, and the markets are all behaving as if one is inevitable. This sector MOC maps the players; the physics lives in the Technology terminology cluster ([[Qubit]], [[Superposition]], [[Entanglement]], [[Decoherence]], [[Quantum Error Correction]], [[Quantum Supremacy]]). ## The pure plays - **[[IonQ]]** — trapped-ion leader and the sector's public-market bellwether (~$19B market cap mid-2026); completed the $1.075B Oxford Ionics acquisition in September 2025; CEO Niccolò de Masi targets 2 million physical qubits by 2030. - **[[Quantinuum]]** — the Honeywell-controlled ion-trap company; its June 2026 Nasdaq IPO (~$1.68B raised, the largest quantum IPO ever) followed its Helios system's 48 logical qubits at 99.921% two-qubit gate fidelity — arguably the best hardware numbers in the industry. - **[[PsiQuantum]]** — the most-funded private pure play (>$1.8B, ~$7B valuation after a BlackRock-led $1B Series E in September 2025); betting everything on photonics and million-qubit scale, with compute centers under construction in Brisbane and Chicago. - **[[Rigetti Computing]]** and **[[D-Wave Quantum]]** — superconducting and annealing plays respectively, both recipients of ~$100M federal letters of intent; both emblematic of the sector's speculative froth (price-to-sales ratios in the hundreds as of May 2026, persistent insider selling). ## Big tech's parallel race [[Alphabet]]'s Google Quantum AI set the pace: the Willow chip (December 2024) demonstrated below-threshold error correction, followed by the October 2025 "Quantum Echoes" verifiable-advantage result and a second hardware modality (neutral atoms) in March 2026. [[IBM]] runs the most detailed public roadmap — Kookaburra (2026) through Starling (2029, 200 logical qubits) to Blue Jay (2033). [[Microsoft]]'s topological Majorana chips remain scientifically contested — its June 2026 Majorana 2 announcement met the same skepticism as the first. [[Amazon]]'s Ocelot cat-qubit chip claims ~90% error-correction overhead reduction. [[NVIDIA]] plays the arms-dealer role: after [[Jensen Huang]]'s "15–30 years away" remark cratered quantum stocks in January 2025, Nvidia reversed course and launched NVQLink (October 2025), an open GPU-to-QPU interconnect adopted by 17 quantum companies and 9 national labs. ## The state moves in The signature 2026 development: Washington started buying in. A ~$2B federal package (May 2026) took minority equity stakes across ~9 firms — [[IBM]] (~$1B), GlobalFoundries (~$375M), and ~$100M each to [[D-Wave Quantum]], [[Rigetti Computing]], [[Quantinuum]], and Infleqtion — extending the [[CHIPS and Science Act]]-era playbook of the state as shareholder. [[DARPA]]'s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative advanced 11 companies toward validating utility-scale fault tolerance by 2033, and a National Quantum Initiative reauthorization (S.3597) is pending in Congress. China's state-directed program — commonly estimated at $10–15B — is the justification for all of it. The security driver is [[Post-Quantum Cryptography]]: "harvest now, decrypt later" adversaries and [[Shor's Algorithm]]'s eventual threat to [[Public-Key Cryptography]] have produced hard federal migration deadlines (NSA's CNSA 2.0 acquisition gate hits January 1, 2027). Q-Day anxiety, not commercial demand, is what makes quantum a national-security sector. ## Coverage gaps Now built: [[DARPA]]. Still missing: Google Quantum AI as a distinct entity (Willow/Quantum Echoes currently have no home), Honeywell (Quantinuum's parent), GlobalFoundries, Infleqtion, Quantum Computing Inc., Atom Computing, and Pasqal. Highest remaining value: a Google Quantum AI or Willow page to anchor the error-correction milestone story. ## See Also - [[IonQ]] · [[Quantinuum]] · [[PsiQuantum]] · [[Rigetti Computing]] · [[D-Wave Quantum]] - [[IBM]] · [[Alphabet]] · [[Microsoft]] · [[Amazon]] · [[NVIDIA]] - [[Qubit]] · [[Quantum Error Correction]] · [[Quantum Supremacy]] · [[Post-Quantum Cryptography]] · [[Shor's Algorithm]] · [[DARPA]] - [[Chipmakers Sector]] — the fabrication substrate quantum depends on - [[AI Sector]] — the frontier bet quantum is priced against