On Microsoft's latest earning call, CEO Satya Nadella hailed quantum computing as the next big accelerator in the cloud that could completely upend the AI race. The company announced the world’s first deployment of a Level 2 Quantum computer in partnership with Atom Computing. Construction begins this fall with early workloads targeted for 2027. Google and IBM are also backing quantum computing projects, and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang claims hybrid quantum-classical computing systems could soon offer “real world utility.” There are numerous potential use cases, and quantum technology will likely be a key enabler within the broader disruptive tech ecosystem. 

One oft-cited concern is “Q-Day,” an anticipated future date when stable, large-scale quantum computers will be capable of breaking the public-key encryption algorithms that secure all of our digital data.This underscores the importance of post-quantum cryptography algorithms, which are currently undergoing standardization. But it also highlights the need for reinforcing pre-existing security strategies today: there is evidence that malicious actors are harvesting data now to wait for the day they will be able to decrypt it. The threat is “particularly acute” for data that needs to be kept confidential for a long time or information related to systems with a long lifetime, like medical records and intellectual property.