Quantum computing in 2022: Newsful, but how useful? has been saved
The authors would like to thank Anh Dung Pham and Pedro Marques for their contributions to this chapter.
Cover image by: Jaime Austin
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Though the technology is steadily improving, quantum computing will likely continue to boast more media coverage than practical applications in 2022. Deloitte Global predicts that the multiple companies making quantum computers (QCs) will double their QCs’ quantum volume—the number and reliability of the quantum bits (qubits) available for computation—from what it was in 2021. VCs invested more than US$1 billion into the sector in 2021, and one company even went public with a multibillion-dollar valuation.1 Further, investment in quantum by governments, including China, India, Japan, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, and the United States, will likely bring the total to more than US$5 billion for the year.2 Although we expect these developments to attract a great deal of news coverage, we also predict that fewer than a dozen companies worldwide will be using QCs as part of their day-to-day operations3 and only for a limited number of use cases mainly around optimization problems. The 2022 revenues for QC hardware, software, and QC-as-a-service will likely be less than US$500 million.4
Current QCs are roughly where heavier-than-air flight was on December 17, 1903. Nobody doubted that there were multiple uses for airplanes, and everyone was excited that powered flight had been achieved … but the Wright Flyer’s best flight that day covered 255 meters in about a minute, a speed of about 15 km/h, with one pilot, no cargo, and no turns. It was a historic achievement, but not useful.
That said, a little more than a decade later, airplanes were instrumental in World War I, and technology advances faster now than it did then. It’s an open question, however, whether quantum computing will follow the same path.
Although QCs are orders of magnitude better than they were five years ago, they remain uneconomic for solving real-world problems. Many of the tasks that they currently do can be replicated on a standard laptop computer at a fraction of the cost.5 The problem with QCs’ usefulness is not a lack of use cases, money, effort, or even progress. It’s that current QCs are not yet powerful enough to tackle problems that can’t be performed by traditional computers. We don’t yet know the “magic number” of quantum volume—a measure of the combined quantity and reliability of the “qubits” that drive a QC’s computing capacity—that will make QCs useful in the real world.
Companies vary in the way they measure quantum volume, but it seems to be a sign of progress that apples-to-apples quantum volumes are doubling, or even growing more quickly, every couple of years. But it is unclear if we need a quantum volume of a thousand or a million or a billion to make QCs that can be used for multiple real-world applications.
Normally, this is the part of our prediction where we discuss which readers should care and why. Some industries do need to pay attention and get their foot in the quantum door: For them, having small teams doing pioneering work may be useful as a risk hedge. But unusually, the key takeaway for most readers in many industries is that they do not need to care about the likely news announcements coming from various quantum computing companies over the next year or two.
Don’t get us wrong. Those companies are investing billions of dollars in research and development; they are pushing the boundaries of engineering and science, and when a useful QC is built at some point, the advancements in 2022 and 2023 will turn out to have been critical steps on the path to utility. But it is not likely that making more qubits, making more stable qubits, or even doing both at the same time will produce a broadly useful QC in the next couple of years.
Should people ignore QCs entirely, then? Not quite. There are a few areas where QCs’ usefulness and dollars are here already. These include:
It’s worth noting, too, that QCs aren’t the only quantum devices that are useful and economically viable for certain purposes. In particular, quantum technology is being used in two applications that, because they were developed earlier than QCs, are bigger markets, at least for now: