Quantum computers with 50 logical qubits are expected to emerge within the next five years. This was stated by Sebastian Hassinger, host of the podcast The New Quantum Era and author of the book of the same name.
He believes this will mark a "point of no return," after which classical simulation methods will become ineffective.
Hassinger shared this forecast during a special episode of the Quantum Computing Report in a discussion with Yuval Boger, the commercial director of QuEra Computing. After nearly a decade at IBM Quantum and AWS, he is now focusing on his consulting project, The New Quantum Era, starting in early 2026.
According to Hassinger, the roadmap for technology development will look like this:
- Short-term: advantage of neutral atom systems;
- Medium-term: dominance of superconducting qubits;
- Long-term: emergence of spin and photonic solutions.
Hassinger noted that neutral atom platforms are showing excellent scaling rates and the implementation of error correction (LDPC codes), but their "Achilles' heel" remains the low clock frequency of operations compared to superconducting systems.
Boger described his colleague's forecast as "conservative," recalling recent successes from Harvard and QuEra in demonstrating 48 logical qubits. He referenced the opinion of QuEra's CTO, Vladan Vuletic, who has extended his confidence horizon for the leadership of neutral atoms from five to ten years.
Boger also emphasized that thanks to new algorithms and memory efficiency (where the ratio of physical to logical qubits can reach nearly 2:1), the industry will not require millions of physical qubits to achieve practical superiority.
In May, Quantum Machines announced a median accuracy of 99.5% for two-qubit operations on Rigetti's commercial superconducting processor, Novera.
On June 1, D-Wave Quantum revealed plans to create a fault-tolerant quantum computer with 100 logical qubits by 2032.