Welcome back to This Week in Quantum — your weekly digest of the most important news from the world of quantum computing.
The last ten days of June brought quantum policy out of the think-tank stage: a presidential executive order, a new DOE initiative, and a fresh round of “who counts as a domestic champion” positioning. On the science side, error correction kept grinding forward in unglamorous but measurable percentage points, while one of Microsoft’s most persistent critics got a peer-reviewed platform to say his piece. Let’s get into it.
Industry News
Trump signs Executive Order 14413 to accelerate U.S. quantum commercialization; DOE launches Quantum Genesis
On June 22, President Trump signed Executive Order 14413, “Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation,” directing a whole-of-government push to accelerate the deployment and commercialization of quantum computing, sensing, and networking, building on the 2018 National Quantum Initiative Act. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios framed the goal as building a quantum computer powerful enough for scientific research while hardening federal systems against future quantum-enabled cyber threats, with officials citing 2028 as a target horizon.
Following on directly from the order, the Department of Energy announced its Quantum Genesis initiative, aiming to develop and deploy the world’s first scientifically relevant, fault-tolerant quantum computing capability by 2028 — building on community input gathered through an earlier Request for Information on fault-tolerant systems. Analysts reading the order’s language on domestic supply chains and sovereign hardware see it positioning IBM and IonQ as the clearest beneficiaries among U.S. pure-play and foundry-adjacent quantum companies.
University of Sydney and IBM push logical qubit survival from under 90% to over 96% per correction cycle
Researchers from the University of Sydney, working with IBM on a 156-qubit Quantum Heron r2 superconducting processor, identified mid-circuit measurement noise — itself a byproduct of error correction — as a significant source of additional error. By redesigning error-correction timing to reduce qubit idling during these measurements, the team lifted logical qubit survival rates from below 90% to over 96% per correction cycle. It’s the kind of unglamorous, percentage-point engineering that actually moves fault tolerance forward, rather than a new record chip.
IBM launches Qiskit Paulice, a postselected error-correction addon for near-term hardware
IBM introduced Qiskit Paulice, a Qiskit addon that embeds “spacetime Pauli checks” into quantum circuits to detect and filter out specific errors after execution, without heavy overhead. The technique works best on Clifford or Clifford-heavy circuits, and early experiments run in partnership with the University of Chicago — including a Quantum Advantage Tracker submission — show real near-term benefits for scaling up noisy hardware.
Henry Legg publicly challenges Microsoft’s Majorana 2 claims in Nature
UK physicist Henry Legg, a longtime critic of Microsoft’s topological qubit program, published a paper in Nature arguing that the software tool Microsoft used to validate its Majorana research contains coding errors and lacks sufficient accuracy. Legg maintains that Microsoft has still not proven its central claim of having created a genuine Majorana quasi-particle, the theoretical building block underpinning its topological approach. It’s a rare case of a technical rebuttal landing in the same top-tier journal as the original claims, rather than staying confined to conference hallway debate.
Bull and Alice & Bob sign MOU to bring cat qubits into European HPC environments
Bull and Alice & Bob signed a memorandum of understanding to deepen collaboration on research, product development, and software aimed at integrating Alice & Bob’s cat-qubit hardware into Bull’s high-performance computing systems, initially targeting France, the UK, and Germany. The partnership follows Alice & Bob’s Helium platform launch and its GENCI deal from earlier in June, continuing the company’s shift from selling standalone chips to being embedded inside broader HPC infrastructure.
Infleqtion launches America’s Quantum Space Initiative
Infleqtion announced America’s Quantum Space Initiative alongside founding partners Voyager Technologies, Monarch Quantum, Armada, and the University of Colorado Boulder, aiming to accelerate quantum technologies for future space systems in support of national security, scientific discovery, and economic competitiveness. Near-term plans center on convening industry leaders and standing up a coordinating hub — this is strategy-deck territory for now, but it signals that U.S. quantum ambitions are explicitly stretching toward orbit, alongside South Korea’s INNOSPACE/Norma announcement earlier in the month.
Taiyi Quantum Technology raises 300 million yuan for ytterbium neutral-atom quantum computers
Shanghai-based Taiyi Quantum Technology (Taiyi Liangsheng) closed a 300 million yuan ($44 million USD) strategic financing round, co-led by Gaorong Ventures and IDG Capital, bringing its cumulative 2026 funding to over 400 million yuan ($59 million USD). The company is commercializing neutral-atom quantum computers built on ytterbium-171 qubits — a bet as much on manufacturing systems engineering as on the underlying physics.
Chicago Quantum Exchange projects a 191,000-job Midwest quantum market within a decade
A new report from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, Quantum Machines, and the Chicago Quantum Exchange projects the Midwest quantum job market could reach 191,000 positions within a decade. As a first concrete step, seven students from City Colleges of Chicago got hands-on training on Quantum Machines’ OPX+ controller — a small but real signal that workforce pipelines are starting to move from slide decks to classrooms.
QCentroid launches QuantumOps, a managed framework for hybrid quantum-classical workflows
QCentroid introduced QuantumOps, an operational framework built on NVIDIA CUDA-Q that aims to bring reproducibility, governance, and benchmarking discipline to enterprise quantum-classical workflows, using “expert agents” to cover each stage from use-case formation to benchmark interpretation. It’s the kind of workflow tooling large enterprises say they need before committing budget to quantum pilots — whether the market actually pays for it remains to be seen.
Research Highlights
Allstate and IBM demonstrate quantum-assisted insurance portfolio optimization
Allstate and IBM published research (on arXiv in May, reported more widely this week) applying a hybrid quantum-classical workflow on IBM Quantum Heron hardware to the knapsack problem underlying home-insurance portfolio construction, where correlated risks make classical optimization difficult. The approach proved competitive with established classical methods, particularly under tight constraints — a useful, if modest, data point for quantum optimization in a regulated industry that moves cautiously.
Quantum Elements and USC publish a Monte Carlo algorithm 45x faster for simulating noisy quantum circuits
Quantum Elements and the University of Southern California published a new Quantum Monte Carlo algorithm in Physical Review Letters that simulates noisy quantum circuits on classical hardware roughly 45 times faster than prior methods. The work supports the company’s development of “digital twins” for quantum error correction — classical models good enough to test correction schemes before committing expensive QPU time to them.
Qilimanjaro adds NVIDIA CUDA-Q support to its QiliSDK for GPU-accelerated emulation
Qilimanjaro integrated NVIDIA CUDA-Q into its QiliSDK Python framework, adding GPU-accelerated emulation across its multimodal backend support — spanning CPU, GPU, and both analog and digital quantum processors. The update extends the company’s pitch of a single development framework that works whether the target backend ends up being a simulator or real hardware.
Classiq and AWS build a hybrid quantum-classical chemistry workflow with Hatch in Singapore
Classiq and AWS demonstrated a hybrid workflow — running classical binding-energy calculations on AWS EC2 instances alongside quantum computation to capture quantum correlations — aimed at improving accuracy beyond what density functional theory alone provides for biochemical binding-energy estimates. It’s a concrete, if narrow, example of quantum computing being slotted into an existing classical HPC pipeline rather than replacing it outright.
Upcoming Events
- Quantum Machine Learning Conference 2026 — June 27, 2026 (online, Poland)
- Quantum Showcase and Congressional Engagement 2026 — June 30, 2026, Washington, D.C., USA
- IEEE qCCL 2026 — July 1–3, 2026, Aalborg, Denmark
- IEEE International Workshop on Quantum Computing: Circuits, Systems, Automation, and Applications (QC-CSAA) — July 7–10, 2026, Kolkata, India
- Helmholtz Quantum Konferenz — July 9–10, 2026, Berlin, Germany
- GRC Quantum Science 2026 — July 26–31, 2026, Easton, MA, USA
- Global Quantum Forum (GQF26) — July 21–23, 2026, Chicago, IL, USA