Welcome back to This Week in Quantum. Last week was a policy-heavy one — governments opened their wallets, Turing laureates were crowned, and Google dropped a bombshell about encryption timelines. Here’s what actually matters.
Industry News
UK Commits £2 Billion to Quantum Computing Scale-Up
The British government announced a major acceleration of its quantum ambitions, pledging an additional £2 billion for quantum procurement and scaling through the new ProQure program — on top of the existing £2.5 billion, ten-year National Quantum Strategy. The funding includes over £500 million for quantum applications in pharmaceuticals, finance, and energy; over £400 million for quantum sensing and navigation; and £125 million earmarked specifically for quantum networking. The National Quantum Computing Centre already has an operational 100-qubit machine from Infleqtion, and IonQ is building a 256-qubit system at the University of Cambridge. This announcement puts the UK on a collision course with the US and China for early hardware leadership.
Atom Computing and Cisco Partner on Distributed Neutral-Atom Network
Atom Computing and Cisco signed a Memorandum of Understanding to build what they claim will be the world’s first distributed neutral-atom quantum network. The plan is to link multiple 1,000-qubit processors using Cisco’s networking infrastructure, sidestepping the physical limits of a single vacuum chamber. The “modular” architecture effectively turns a collection of individual machines into a unified, larger system — a concept that mirrors how classical data centers scaled through networking rather than monolithic hardware.
Horizon Quantum Computing Lists on Nasdaq After $120M Merger
Singapore-based Horizon Quantum Computing completed its business combination with dMY Squared Technology Group and began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker HQ. The deal generated approximately $120 million in gross proceeds. Horizon’s focus is on making quantum programming accessible — lowering the barrier for developers who don’t have a physics PhD — which positions it in a growing but underserved layer of the quantum stack.
SEEQC Achieves Full-Stack Quantum Control at Millikelvin Temperatures
UK-based SEEQC reported a significant hardware milestone: a fully integrated quantum computer with digital control logic running at just 10 millikelvin. Operating classical control logic at the same cryogenic temperature as the qubits removes a major bottleneck in scaling superconducting systems — currently, control wiring from room temperature to the chip is one of the biggest engineering headaches in the field.
Research Highlights
Scientists Find a 48-Dimensional World Hidden Inside Quantum Light
Researchers made a striking discovery using a routine quantum optics technique: entangled light carries hidden topological structures reaching up to 48 dimensions. This vastly expands the theoretical “alphabet” available for encoding quantum information in photons, with direct implications for quantum communication bandwidth and the efficiency of photonic quantum computers.
Turing Award Goes to Quantum Science for the First Time
The ACM named Charles H. Bennett (IBM Research) and Gilles Brassard (University of Montreal) as recipients of the 2025 A.M. Turing Award — the first time in the prize’s history that it has recognized work rooted in quantum physics. The pair were honoured for establishing the foundations of quantum information science, including the BB84 quantum key distribution protocol and the concept of quantum teleportation. Their 1984 paper is now the cornerstone of quantum cryptography deployed in real-world networks today.
The Bigger Picture
Google Moves Q-Day to 2029 — and Starts Shipping PQC in Android
The headline that rattled the security world: Google published a report on March 25 formally moving its internal estimate for “Q-Day” — the point at which a quantum computer could break current encryption — to 2029. That’s earlier than the NSA’s 2031 target and reflects progress in quantum error correction and updated factoring resource estimates. Critically, Google isn’t just warning: Android 17 will include ML-DSA quantum-resistant signatures for app signing and verified boot, making it one of the first consumer operating systems to ship post-quantum cryptography by default.
The core risk Google is flagging isn’t just future decryption — it’s the “store now, decrypt later” threat, where adversaries are already harvesting encrypted data today to crack it once quantum hardware matures. If you work in security, the window to act is now measured in years, not decades.
One More Thing
Italy’s competition authority (AGCM) launched a formal market investigation into quantum computing, citing concern that hyperscalers could use existing cloud dominance to lock in the quantum market before it matures — the same dynamic regulators are wrestling with in AI. Quantum antitrust is officially a thing now.
The theme of last week: quantum is becoming too important to leave to physicists alone. Governments are funding it, lawyers are regulating it, security teams are panicking about it, and Cisco is putting it in a rack. The next few years will be defined not by who builds the best qubit — but by who builds the best ecosystem around it.
Upcoming Events
- March 28–April 2 — APS Global Physics Summit, Denver (quantum sessions ongoing)
- April 6–9 — QIP 2026, Montréal (quantum information processing research conference)
- May 5–8 — IQT Quantum + AI, New York City