> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.kevinmeyer.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Quantum Computing for the Nontechnical Executive - URL: https://www.kevinmeyer.com/quantum-computing-for-the-nontechnical-executive/ - Published: 2026-10-29T17:44:02.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-29T18:02:17.000Z - Author: Kevin Meyer - Tags: quantum ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c3/9a/c39a9c8a-1d82-46be-8e4f-ed7e6cd347f4/content/images/2026/10/googleconduc-1.jpg) After my last few posts on quantum, several of you wrote back with roughly the same reaction: intrigued, slightly unnerved, and not at all sure what the thing actually is. Fair enough. So here's a summary intended for the nontechnical executive leader. I'll cover the basics of the technology, what I predict will happen, and what steps a leader should take now. ## What is quantum computing? Quantum mechanics is the rulebook for very small things like electrons and photons. In this strange world, particles can exist in a blend of states until something measures it (superposition), and two particles can become linked so that measuring one instantly tells you about the other even if they're separated by large distances (entanglement). A normal computer stores information as bits, each a 0 or a 1\. On or off, true or false. A quantum computer uses qubits, which can hold a weighted blend of both, and a few hundred entangled qubits can represent more combinations than there are atoms in the observable universe. The conceptualization I find most useful is that a quantum computer weighs every possible answer at once and hands back the likeliest, while a classical computer has to grind through candidates one at a time. A physicist would groan, but for lay people like us it's still the right mental model. Diving a layer deeper, each possible answer carries an amplitude, and unlike an ordinary probability, an amplitude can be negative. A quantum algorithm is choreographed so wrong answers cancel each other out and right ones reinforce, much the way noise-cancelling headphones erase the drone of a jet engine. Classical probabilities can only add, but quantum ones can subtract. You also don't get the answer in one shot. Measure the qubits and you get exactly one result, so you run the same circuit thousands of times and build a histogram. Anyone who's done Six Sigma work will recognize the setup: a good quantum algorithm is a process engineered so that the histogram is one tall spike on the right answer, and the fuzz around it is mostly noise, closer to common-cause variation than signal. So instead of grinding through each potential scenario in binary fashion on a conventional computer, a quantum computer rapidly tries all potential answers at once and identifies the one with the highest probability, which for the right problems can be quickly checked by the conventional computer. Think of it as a specialized coprocessor bolted onto a conventional computer, closer to a GPU than a PC. The problems that fit best are the ones nature poses, like how electrons behave in a drug molecule or a battery material. Classical computers manage those by approximating, trimming away the unlikely electron arrangements to keep the math tractable. A quantum computer can hold them all natively. ## What does the hardware look like? So what is a "qubit"? It's both an idea and a thing. The idea is the basic unit of quantum information, the way a "bit" is the basic unit of ordinary information. A quantum bit... qubit. A bit doesn't care what it's made of: in your laptop it's a voltage on a transistor, and on an old punch card it was a hole or no hole. A qubit works the same way. It's any physical object with two distinct states that can sit in a blend of both and still be steered and read on command. That last part is what makes them so hard to build. Physical qubits are fragile. A stray vibration or flicker of heat scrambles them, so today's machines make errors constantly. Error correction bundles many physical qubits into one reliable logical qubit, often at ratios of hundreds to one. Think of this as the power of redundancy. When a quantum company announces a qubit count, my first question now is which kind. Engineers have found several objects that qualify, which is why the industry looks like a zoo. IBM and Google build tiny loops of superconducting metal, chilled colder than deep space, that behave like artificial atoms; the qubit's two states are the circuit's two lowest energy levels. Quantinuum and IonQ use real atoms, individual charged ions suspended in electric fields and nudged with lasers. Atom Computing and QuEra hold neutral atoms in place with beams of light, PsiQuantum encodes qubits in single particles of light, Diraq uses the spin of single electrons in silicon chips built much like ordinary ones, and Microsoft is betting on an exotic topological design that's still being debated. Around every qubit sits a mountain of conventional engineering: refrigeration or vacuum systems, lasers or microwave controls, wiring, and a classical computer decoding errors in microseconds. (D-Wave sells a different kind of machine, an annealer, built for a narrower class of scheduling and routing problems.) [DARPA notes that no architecture has pulled ahead](https://www.wisdomtree.com/us/insights/blog/darpa-moves-quantum-from-roadmaps-to-hardware-testing-what-stage-c-means?ref=kevinmeyer.com), which I find reassuring as an investor and maddening as a reader. Reading those descriptions, and seeing the photo of a Google quantum computer at the beginning of this post, I'm reminded of the old black-and-white photos of engineers standing beside ENIAC, a machine that filled a room and weighed about 30 tons, or even the IBM System/360 behemoths a couple decades later. Far greater computing power is now in your pocket as part of your phone. ## Where the industry stands now Honestly? Further along than the skeptics claim, and well short of what the press releases imply. Google reported in October 2025 that its Willow chip ran a physics simulation roughly 13,000 times faster than the best classical supercomputer. IBM and its partners announced in July that they'd entered the "quantum advantage era." Quantinuum's Helios, which the company says is the [most accurate commercial machine available](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/quantinuum-ipo-targets-12-7b-162055146.html?ref=kevinmeyer.com), runs 98 physical qubits. I'd still call that a lab instrument with a sales team. Money has arrived ahead of the machines. McKinsey's [2026 Quantum Technology Monitor](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-technology/our-insights/mckinsey-quantum-technology-monitor-2026-a-commercial-tipping-point?ref=kevinmeyer.com) counts more than $1 billion in 2025 revenue for quantum computing companies and $12.6 billion invested in quantum startups that year. The test I watch most closely is DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, which asks whether anyone can build a quantum computer whose value exceeds its cost by 2033\. Earlier this month, [Atom Computing, Diraq, IBM, and IonQ](https://www.hpcwire.com/2026/10/07/atom-computing-diraq-ibm-and-ionq-advance-to-darpa-qbi-stage-c/?ref=kevinmeyer.com) joined Microsoft and PsiQuantum in the final, hands-on verification stage. ## The risk just around the corner Here's the closest ramification of quantum computing that touches every company and even individual. Most internet encryption, including your company's VPN and your bank's login, rests on math problems (RSA and elliptic curve cryptography) that a large enough quantum computer running Shor's algorithm could solve. In 2025 Google researchers estimated RSA-2048 could fall to a machine with [under a million noisy qubits](https://quantumzeitgeist.com/q-day/?ref=kevinmeyer.com), down from 20 million in a 2019 estimate, and preprints this spring claimed [far fewer still](https://quantumcomputingreport.com/?ref=kevinmeyer.com). In March, Google set [2029 as its own deadline](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/cryptography-migration-timeline/?ref=kevinmeyer.com) for moving to post-quantum cryptography. I couldn't help noticing that one of the companies building the machine is racing to protect itself from it. 2029 sounds comfortably distant until you count. It's the end of 2026, so that's about three years, which in corporate IT is a budget cycle and one stubborn vendor migration. The catch is "harvest now, decrypt later." An adversary can copy encrypted data today and read it whenever the hardware shows up, so anything that has to stay secret for a decade is already exposed if it travels on today's encryption. NIST's [draft guidance](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8547/ipd?ref=kevinmeyer.com) would deprecate RSA and its cousins after 2030 and disallow them after 2035\. I spent a good part of my career in medical devices, where products can stay in the field longer than that. Are you a crypto investor? As I wrote early this year, that same [quantum computing power can break signatures that protect crypto wallets](https://www.kevinmeyer.com/why-quantum-computing-threatens-blockchains-cryptographic-foundation/). Most crypto providers are working to prevent this, but a similar "harvest now" problem exists, and many public keys sit openly on the ledger today. ## What I'd do as a company leader I'd sort the work by deadline. The security work is already late. The opportunity work can wait for evidence. **Now, through 2027.** Start with cryptography, since it's the one item with a deadline. Have IT build an inventory of where you use public-key encryption, including inside vendor products and long-lived equipment, then rank the data by how long it must stay secret. Ask every critical vendor for its post-quantum roadmap and write it into the next contract renewal. It's an asset inventory, the kind of unglamorous work operations people already know how to do. Then go after the data itself. "Harvest now, decrypt later" only works on data an attacker can reach, so the cheapest protection is having less of it lying around. Find the crown jewels that would still hurt in 2035 (trade secrets, formulas, personnel and medical records, M&A files) and delete what you no longer need. Move what's left off the network into offline or tightly segmented storage, and re-encrypt it with AES-256, which quantum computers aren't expected to break in any practical sense. On the opportunity side, keep it small. If your business lives on chemistry or hard scheduling problems, give one curious engineer a modest budget, cloud access (the big cloud providers all rent quantum time), and a real problem to try. Skip the hardware, and be wary of consultants selling quantum readiness at enterprise prices. **By 2029.** Anything customer-facing or holding long-lived secrets should be running post-quantum encryption, the standard Google has set for itself. The same year is when the first error-corrected machines are due: IBM's [Starling](https://aibusiness.com/quantum-computing/ibm-plans-first-large-scale-fault-tolerant-quantum-computer-by-2029?ref=kevinmeyer.com), with 200 logical qubits running 100 million operations, and Quantinuum's [Apollo](https://siliconangle.com/2026/06/04/quantum-computer-maker-quantinuum-closes-flat-1-68b-ipo/?ref=kevinmeyer.com). I'd treat both dates as aspirations, since hardware schedules slip and these are some of the hardest on earth. Or, AI-enhanced development may speed this up. Plan to be ready anyway, with a short list of problems worth testing and someone in-house who has enough knowledge to guide the effort. **2030 and beyond.** This is when NIST's draft dates start to bite, and when the commercial question finally gets answered. IBM plans Blue Jay, at 2,000 logical qubits, around 2033, the same year DARPA wants to know whether any quantum computer can be worth more than it costs. If the answer is yes, chemistry gets the machines first: catalysts and battery materials, then drug candidates, the argument I made in [While We Were Processing AI, Quantum Arrived](https://www.kevinmeyer.com/while-we-were-processing-ai-quantum-arrived/). Finance and logistics may follow on thinner evidence. McKinsey puts the value at stake at $1.3 to $2.7 trillion by 2035, a figure I hold loosely for an industry that currently books about what a decent midsize manufacturer does. ## What I'd do as an investor I own speculative positions in some of these companies, so take my view with the appropriate salt. Pure-play valuations are extraordinary: late last year IonQ traded around 150 times trailing sales, D-Wave around 300, and Rigetti close to 1,000\. Quantinuum raised $1.68 billion in its June IPO on 2025 revenue of about $31 million and a net loss of $193 million. Those prices assume a winner, and the people running the most rigorous evaluation can't name one yet. My approach is to own the probability that quantum works and let someone else pick the winning qubit. Large companies with serious quantum programs (IBM, Alphabet, Microsoft, Honeywell as Quantinuum's largest shareholder) let the speculation ride inside a real business. Suppliers of cryogenics and lasers get paid regardless of which qubit wins, and post-quantum security vendors have a revenue driver with a federal deadline attached. Consolidation has started too: IonQ bought SkyWater for $1.8 billion, and Intel agreed this week to acquire Classiq. Whatever you hold in pure plays, size it as money you can watch fall 80 percent without losing sleep. (Not investment advice, obviously. I'm a retired operator with a spreadsheet.) My quantum portfolio currently holds QBTS, INFQ, FORM, HQ, IONQ, KEYS, QNT, RGTI. INFQ, IONQ, and QNT are my highest conviction plays. I believe this represents the strongest players across a range of technologies and systems. You need a strong stomach - each of these has swung +/- 50%+ this year alone. ## How to sound quantum smart at dinner (or in the boardroom) For the next time quantum comes up over drinks, or worse, in a board meeting where everyone's nodding along: - **The one-liner:** it weighs every possible answer at once, and hands back the likeliest. If someone pushes, the real trick is interference, where wrong answers cancel out. - **Ask "physical or logical?"** Headline qubit counts are physical. The number that matters is logical, error-corrected qubits, and it's much smaller. - **Call it a coprocessor.** It'll sit beside conventional computers the way a GPU does, handling the narrow problems nature poses. - **Chemistry first.** Catalysts, batteries and drug molecules get the early wins from quantum computing power; everything else waits. - **Remember 2029.** It's the target for IBM's Starling, Quantinuum's Apollo and Google's own encryption migration. - **Drop "harvest now, decrypt later."** Then ask who owns your company's cryptography inventory, and watch for scared faces in the room.