As artificial intelligence (AI) has risen, albeit with concerns about utility and profitability, another promising technology has found itself eclipsed. While chatbots and, latterly, agentic AIs have colonised the public imagination, quantum computing, the promised next breakthrough in technology, has dropped off the radar.
It hasn’t gone away, though. While shares in quantum computer companies Rigetti, IonQ and D-Wave have declined since a 2025 jump, they have not crashed to previous levels. There is also evidence of new investors coming on board. According to the Wall Street Journal, US-based Oratomic is now valued at $5.4 billion, and the Next Web has reported that a new UK-based quantum outfit, Universal Quantum, announced it had been funded to the tune of $100 million.
Analysts Gartner, meanwhile, have said that they expect quantum computing revenue will surpass $1 billion next year.
The areas expected to open their wallets first, and widest, are interesting. According to Gartner’s projections, governments and banks will be buying.
“The public sector is projected to lead all industries in quantum computing spending through 2027. Spending will be driven by a strong desire for nations to gain technical leadership. In 2027, the public sector is expected to spend $245 million on quantum computing, up from $219 million in 2026”, Gartner said.
Next up will be banking, finance and insurance, it said, which is forecast to overtake the public sector and “become the largest source of quantum computing spending from 2028 through 2030”.
Finance industry use-cases include portfolio optimisation, risk modelling, and fraud detection, with Gartner expecting a spend of $289 million in 2028. Public sector spending is projected to be $280 million that year.
Early advantage
As large as these sums are, though, they are small potatoes when set beside the hitherto unknown integers being reported as spending on AI. Of course, all spending is low until it’s not and the tech industry clearly fancies quantum as at least a potential way forward. Leaving aside the start-ups, this alone explains the interest of the likes of IBM, Google and Microsoft: it’s a punt.
In fact, it’s a fairly big punt as they go. No-one thinks quantum computers will replace today’s ‘classical’ computers – they’re just not built to do the same thing – but control of a tasty niche still has value. People make money from supercomputers, after all, but when did you last buy one? In addition, over time quantum computing, should it prove both viable and useful, could have all manner of unknown downstream effects on the industry.
Gaurav Gupta, VP analyst and chief of research for the emerging market dynamics research team at Gartner, said: “Nations and businesses have scaled spending in quantum literacy, patents, partnerships, and early use-case exploration.”
While acknowledging continued difficulties, Gupta said that we were now in the “early quantum advantage era”.
Notably, quantum computing is generally thought to be more useful for very complex but low-data problems, rather than today’s more common methodology to use as much data as possible to read the tea leaves. Think cracking a code, not working out how to sell you more paperclips.
So, given this and the fact that investors continue to pony up, perhaps it’s just a question of how to get there from here. Or perhaps not.
Gartner predicts a major shakeout in the sector by 2030, expecting “an exhaustion of viable commercial revenue will force over 50% of quantum computing start-ups out of business, as the market rejects qubit modalities that fail to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing.”
Predictions that start-ups fail are a bit dog-bites-man, but read that last clause of that sentence again as it is surprisingly revealing.
Qubits, which are quantum computing’s basic computational unit and can be a zero or a one (just like a digital bit) as well as in a superposition of the two, are extremely fragile. They can be damaged by heat, electromagnetic fields and can ‘decohere’ as they interact with their environment. That does give some indication of where we are, though. When was the last time you thought about a digital bit degrading?
No clear winner has yet emerged from the methods of preserving qubits, such as superconducting and trapped ions. However, even if quantum computing is to prove theoretically useful for tasks such as cryptanalysis, chemistry and materials simulation, major progress will be required including, arguably, a generally-agreed direction of travel.
Ltd
