Quantum computing insiders, investors, and skeptics have been waiting on an announcement from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that has enormous implications for the future of the industry: the list of companies that have survived Stage A of the agency’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) and are advancing to Stage B.
The QBI was launched in July 2024 to “rigorously verify and validate whether any quantum computing approach can achieve utility-scale operation” by 2033, according to DARPA. In essence, the QBI seeks to determine if a quantum computer technology is worth pursuing—if its benefits will be greater than the effort and resources it takes to pursue them.
For a technology that could produce world-changing feats but remains far from maturity—and into which billions of investment dollars have been flowing in recent months—the QBI validation is profound.
The QBI’s first judgments, announced yesterday, reconfigure the competitive landscape, bolstering some powerful incumbents and boosting lesser-known players and outlier approaches. They also delivered a formidable gut punch to a couple of industry pioneers.
“QBI is not a competition to narrow the field to a few ‘winners.’ Rather, the aim is to evaluate each company’s approach on its own merits” DARPA said in a press release. The agency makes clear that multiple participants could “demonstrate a path to an industrially useful quantum computer,” or perhaps none of them.
