This week the quantum threat to encryption moved from abstract to urgent — Google and a startup published papers suggesting Q-Day may arrive sooner than anyone expected. Meanwhile, hardware milestones kept coming: Rigetti crossed 100 qubits on AWS, India built one of the longest QKD networks in the world, and researchers in Innsbruck demonstrated fault-tolerant computation without mid-circuit measurements.
Industry News
Rigetti launches 108-qubit Cepheus-1 on AWS Braket
Rigetti Computing released its Cepheus-1-108Q processor — now available via Rigetti QCS and Amazon Braket. Built from twelve interconnected 9-qubit chiplets, the system achieves 99.1% median two-qubit gate fidelity and 60ns gate speeds, making it the first gate-based device with over 100 qubits available on AWS. Rigetti is targeting 99.5% fidelity later this year as part of its three-year roadmap toward quantum advantage.
QBoson raises $145M Series B to scale photonic quantum hardware
Chinese photonics startup QBoson secured CNY 1 billion ($145 million USD) in Series B funding, led by Beijing Financial Holdings and ICBC Capital. The round will fund expansion of the company’s Shenzhen factory, which produces room-temperature photonic quantum systems ranging from 100 to 1,000 qubits targeting finance, drug discovery, and power grid optimization.
India’s National Quantum Mission hits 1,000-km QKD milestone
India demonstrated a 1,000-kilometer quantum communication network — one of the longest in the world — developed by QNu Labs using the ARMOS QKD platform and validated by VIAVI Solutions. The milestone was reached in under two years, well ahead of the original eight-year roadmap. The network is designed to secure India’s defense and financial infrastructure with a sovereign quantum backbone.
S&P Global: quantum market revenue set to nearly quadruple in 2026
A new S&P Global report projects quantum market revenue will rise from $2.5 billion in 2025 to nearly $9 billion in 2026, as investment in quantum technologies surpassed $55 billion last year. Analysts describe the industry as entering a phase of “evaluation rather than speculation,” with 76% of enterprise respondents expecting quantum computing to deliver material value within five years.
Research Highlights
Google and Oratomic: Q-Day may be closer than we thought
The biggest story of the week came from two concurrent papers — one from Google, one from startup Oratomic — suggesting that quantum computers capable of breaking today’s encryption protocols may arrive sooner than previously expected. The Oratomic team, which includes former Google Quantum AI researchers, used AI to accelerate development of their algorithm. “There is no question that we used AI to accelerate this development,” said co-author Dolev Bluvstein. The work has not yet been peer-reviewed, and some assumptions remain untested — but the reaction was immediate: Cloudflare announced it was accelerating its quantum-readiness deadline to 2029, six years ahead of NIST’s official 2035 target.
Innsbruck team runs fault-tolerant algorithm without mid-circuit measurements
Researchers at the University of Innsbruck and RWTH Aachen demonstrated a complete fault-tolerant quantum algorithm — Grover’s search — on three logical qubits, without any mid-circuit measurements. Published in Nature Communications, the work removes one of the biggest practical bottlenecks in quantum error correction: the need to pause computation, measure, and feed results back into the system. “For the first time, we have shown that a complete fault-tolerant quantum algorithm can be executed without mid-circuit measurements with feed-forward control,” said Ivan Pogorelov.
Norway: real-time tracking of qubit relaxation rates
A team at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) published in Physical Review X a technique that tracks how quickly superconducting qubits lose their quantum information — over 100 times faster than previous methods. By monitoring relaxation rates in near real time, researchers can finally observe what goes wrong inside quantum processors as it happens, opening a new path toward diagnosing and correcting errors dynamically.
The Bigger Picture
The encryption conversation shifted gears this week. For years, Q-Day has been a theoretical concern — something to prepare for by 2035. The Google and Oratomic papers, combined with Cloudflare moving its deadline to 2029, signal that the industry is no longer treating it as a distant problem. At the same time, the hardware progress — Rigetti at 108 qubits, India’s 1,000-km QKD network, measurement-free fault tolerance — is a reminder that both the threat and the defenses are advancing in parallel. The race is on.
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