Thank you for tuning in to this audio-only podcast presentation. This is week 196 of the Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week, the topic under consideration for the Lindahl Letter is, “Is quantum computing becoming an establishment play?”
You probably have heard of IBM, Google, and Microsoft. They are a pretty big deal in the technology world. IBM has a really involved and well-defined quantum computing roadmap [1]. They pretty much tell everybody who will listen about it. That roadmap includes details about error correction, fault tolerance, and the road to 10,000 gates. We also have a roadmap from Google Quantum AI which details 6 milestones and notes that they have achieved 2 of the 6 noted milestones [2]. We also have a fun quantum roadmap from the Microsoft team that notes 3 levels: foundational, resilient, and scale [3]. All those roadmaps make me wonder if quantum computing will end up becoming, in the end, a pure establishment play. On a side note, building a matrix that compares all 3 roadmaps might be interesting for a future research note and has been added to the backlog.
Some of the companies we mentioned earlier in Lindahl Letter research notes like Rigetti Computing, D‑Wave Quantum, IonQ, and Quantum Computing Inc. are doing both pure research into quantum computing to drive the technology forward and applied applications of that research, allowing people to actually access hardware. The Amazon Braket functionality platforms quantum hardware and will sell you actual access to IonQ, Rigetti, QuEra, and IQM for a reservation rate of under $7,000.00 per hour [4]. Making AWS positioned to deliver as long as the hardware is available for sale in the quantum space. That AWS hardware-as-a-service model spreads out risk. If Google or Microsoft ends up being the winner, then that strategy might involve having to buy services by API from them as they might not distribute hardware.
Apple as a company has a lot of available cash and could make a defensive patent play here by acquiring a potentially emerging technology leader in the quantum computing space. Given the workloads on Apple devices are highly repeatable and pattern-specific, maybe an annealing play while potentially limited in the end could work in the near horizon. Apple engineers are incorporating post-quantum cryptography (PQC) into their messaging and technology stacks, so they are working ahead of the game, but not directly in the quantum hardware space at least in an observable way [5].
My concern here and the reason for this research note is that no matter what innovation ends up happening in the quantum computing space, the establishment technology companies may end up winning. They may move a little bit slower getting things to market, but will end up winning the space at scale and delivery. As we all know by now, the elephant does not dance all that quickly. However, those three companies (IBM, Google, and Microsoft) do have a history of delivering enterprise scale. My guess here is if one of the quantum computing companies listed above ends up getting a key technology patented and gains a distinct advantage, the bidding war to complete an acquisition will be intense. It’s also possible that IBM may end up building the winning quantum computer by 2028, which is what they are currently shouting from the rooftops [6]. They are and have been delivering on a detailed, very well-publicized roadmap.
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Footnotes:
[1] https://www.ibm.com/roadmaps/quantum/
[2] https://quantumai.google/roadmap
[3] https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/vision/quantum-roadmap
[4] https://aws.amazon.com/braket/pricing/
[5] https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/
[6] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/10/1118297/ibm-large-scale-error-corrected-quantum-computer-by-2028/
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