Quantum after the hype. Reality checks in

By Marc Ambasna-Jones 12 Dec 25 Reading time: 8 mins

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told analysts in January that useful quantum computers were still 15–30 years away, and would never replace GPUs, only “complement” them, it sent a few ripples across the industry and of course, Wall Street. A few share prices (IonQ and Rigetti Computing) took a hit, but in truth, as Huang later admitted, the comments were fair but also a little broad. In an industry that has consistently had to manage expectation, a dose of reality hurt but as Professor Ruth Oulton, a quantum photonics expert from the University of Bristol, pointed out, if we’re talking about cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) then Huang was being fair.

Yes, fault-tolerant machines are still distant, but critical-scale systems may arrive much sooner than people think, especially if qubit counts and error rates keep improving on current trajectories. Layer on IBM’s claims of “quantum utility”, Microsoft’s work using quantum-inspired methods to discover a new solid-state battery electrolyte, and China’s increasingly loud signalling on quantum cryptography, and 2025 starts to look less like “nothing to see here” and more like a dress rehearsal for the next decade.

The question for 2026 is who is actually going to be ready for quantum, as it moves increasingly towards hybrid models with traditional compute? Commercialisation is going to be even more of a driving force.

2025: from concept to accountability

McKinsey chose its words carefully this year, labelling 2025 “the year of quantum: from concept to reality”. Governments have stopped quietly sprinkling grants around physics departments and started using industrial policy language instead – sovereignty, supply chains, IP control.

A few numbers set the tone:

• McKinsey now expects quantum technologies to create around $97bn in value by 2035, with computing accounting for about $72bn of that.
• Quantum start-ups raised roughly $2bn in 2024, up 50% year-on-year.
• That capital translated into $650–750m of revenue last year, with the sector tipped to pass the $1bn revenue mark in 2025.

Follow the money: quantum’s funding crunch (and why 2026 matters)

One recurring theme this year was that access to capital is both better than it was and still not good enough.

At the UK National Quantum Technologies Showcase, speakers including Innovate UK’s Tom Adeyoola, the British Business Bank’s George Mills, and VCs from Twin Track Ventures and Amadeus Capital were blunt. Early-stage funding isn’t the problem. The gap is at Series B/C and beyond where £50m+ rounds are needed and founders are still being told to fly to the US to find a lead investor.

Manjari Chandran-Ramesh from Amadeus Capital Partners described UK pension money as moving at a “glacial” pace into venture, despite Mansion House reforms. Mills talked about “knotty technical challenges” in how pension funds are structured that make deep-tech VC allocations hard. In short, the UK has world-class science and some good funds, but still lacks enough domestic investors willing to lead big, illiquid bets on frontier hardware. 

Set against that backdrop, two 2025 moments feel important for 2026…

• IonQ / Oxford Ionics – The UK government’s approval of IonQ’s $1.075bn acquisition of Oxford Ionics under the National Security and Investment Act, with conditions to keep hardware and core IP in the UK, looks like a prototype for strategic exits. It acknowledges that British firms will sometimes sell to US acquirers but insists national capability doesn’t vanish in the process. 
• Firgun Ventures’ first close – Firgun’s launch as a $250m specialist quantum growth fund, with a $70m first close anchored by the Qatar Investment Authority and support from figures including Cambridge Quantum/Quantinuum founder Ilyas Khan, signals that more thesis-driven capital is arriving at Series A/B. The focus is explicitly on companies that have already crossed from lab to market, with an advisory bench that runs from Cambridge and Oxford to MIT, Google, the Wellcome Trust and the European Investment Bank (EIB).

This hints at what 2026 will probably bring: fewer, larger cheques; more structured exits; and a debate about how much of Europe’s quantum future should be domestically owned versus globally integrated.

Beyond hardware: software, security and the quiet stack

One of the clearest threads running through the year is that software development has been quietly gaining ground. Robert Sutor described the industry as a jigsaw puzzle where everyone obsesses over single tiles – a flashy QPU here, a headline grant there – but very few are assembling the full picture, such as in error-correcting codes, control electronics, cryogenics, lasers, compilers, cloud access, and workflow orchestration. 

It’s fair to say that every major tech transition ends with software dominating, and quantum is not going to be any different. From cross-platform SDKs and algorithm toolkits to hybrid schedulers that quietly slot quantum calls into classical workflows, 2025 saw software development advance. 

“There’s often talk of a chicken-and-egg challenge between quantum hardware and software,” Yuval Boger, chief commercial officer at QuEra, told BI Foresight. “But in reality, they must evolve together. Quantum hardware needs software. Just like a powerful CPU is useless without an operating system, software also needs the right hardware foundations to demonstrate value.” 

Security is a key driver of course. Adam Sandman’s piece for Foresight spelled out the financial sector’s dilemma that quantum-capable decryption might be 3–15 years away, but attackers can already harvest encrypted data in the hope of cracking it later. The result is a slow-motion Y2K, only without a fixed deadline.

By the end of 2025:

• PQC standards from NIST and others had moved from draft to implementation planning.
• Banks, insurers, and payment firms were starting quantum-security working groups.
• Governments were rolling out their own quantum-safe and QKD pilots, often in parallel. 

2026 is unlikely to deliver a single “Q-Day”. However it will bring uncomfortable boardroom discussions about crypto-agility, key management and how much of the IT estate can realistically be upgraded in time.

Skills: from “quantum physicist required” to “quantum-literate workforce”

If you read only job listings, you’d think the only way into quantum is a PhD in physics and a fondness for Helium-3. Foresight’s piece with Christopher Bishop – From bass lines to qubits – tells a different story.

Bishop went from playing bass with ZZ Top and Bo Diddley to IBM and then to becoming a kind of travelling quantum evangelist. His point is that mindset and adaptability matter as much as formal credentials. Quantum companies now need people who can sell, explain, design, instrument, regulate, and test.

The UK government’s Quantum Skills Taskforce estimates the global industry could need up to 840,000 quantum-literate workers by 2035 – a big leap from today’s research-heavy workforce.

That has two implications for 2026:

• For companies – “quantum literacy” training will matter as much as headhunting rare specialists. Expect more internal academies, micro-credentials, and modular courses aimed at software engineers, product managers, and security architects who need to understand quantum’s implications without becoming theorists.
• For regions – places like Bristol, with universities, spinout ecosystems and outreach platforms, have a genuine opportunity to become talent hubs, not just grant hubs. But they’ll need to scale placements, internships, and cross-disciplinary programmes, not just PhD cohorts.

So what does 2026 actually look like?

Taken together, 2026 looks as though it will have fewer sweeping claims about quantum advantage but more boardroom debates over timelines, standards, and ROI.

• More utility, not “magic”
  Expect to see more case studies where quantum (or quantum-inspired) tools quietly improve an optimisation, a simulation, or a risk model by 5–15%, not 500%. Useful enough to matter, dull enough to be real.
• Funding concentration
  The long tail of hardware start-ups will start to thin out. Survivors will either be extremely well-funded platform players, or ruthlessly focused component/software businesses. Funds like Firgun – and specialist platforms in Europe, North America, and Asia – will become more visible gatekeepers. 
• Sovereignty with footnotes
  Deals like IonQ/Oxford Ionics hint at the new normal where foreign acquirers are allowed in, but only if hardware, IP, and jobs are anchored locally. Expect more conditions, more NSIA-style scrutiny and more debate about whether shaped exits are enough to build domestic giants. 
• Security programmes hitting phase two
  PQC pilots are beginning to evolve into actual migration roadmaps. Financial institutions, telecoms providers and governments will begin publishing quantum-risk positions, if only to reassure regulators and investors. 
• Skills as the new bottleneck
  Hardware will keep improving, but the limiting factor for many organisations will be people – not just physicists, but product owners, compliance teams and engineers who can translate quantum research into operational systems. 

Sir Peter Knight likes to talk about “climbing the quantum mountain” – a long, deliberate ascent rather than a sprint to a single summit. The past year, as our coverage has shown, was the point where governments, investors, and founders stopped arguing about whether the mountain is real and started worrying about routes, supplies, and weather. 

2026 is not expected to deliver a flag-on-the-peak moment, but if it delivers more honest funding, clearer roadmaps, and a few less glamorous but genuinely useful deployments, it might turn out to be a significantly beneficial year. And you can never really have enough of those.

Marc Ambasna-Jones / Editor

Working as a technology journalist and writer since 1989, Marc has written for a wide range of titles on technology, business, education, politics and sustainability, with work appearing in The Guardian, The Register, New Statesman, Computer Weekly and many more.