WASHINGTON, July 8 — A 2016 cloud-access launch by IBM has quietly established the foundational timeline for what is now a government-backed race to build the world’s first practical quantum computer. According to the record, IBM’s Quantum Experience, which went live that year, gave researchers and developers remote access to early quantum processors over the internet. The move effectively opened a closed laboratory technology to a global user base years before the commercial sector fully grasped the implications.
The timeline shows that by 2023, IBM had unveiled two processors: a 1,121-qubit chip called Condor and a 133-qubit processor named Heron. Those releases marked a leap in scale from the smaller systems that preceded them, though the company has not yet announced a commercial timeline for error-corrected quantum computing based on those designs.
Google’s Supremacy Claim and the Willow Chip
Google entered the timeline in 2019, when it demonstrated quantum supremacy using its 53-qubit Sycamore processor — a claim that the company said proved a quantum machine could solve a specific problem faster than a classical supercomputer. In 2024, Google announced a new quantum chip called Willow, though the company has not disclosed its qubit count or performance benchmarks publicly. The record shows that the supremacy demonstration, while contested by some rivals, served as a catalyst for accelerated investment across the industry.
Sources familiar with the sector note that the claim forced competitors to articulate their own roadmaps more clearly.
Microsoft, Intel, and the Startups
Microsoft has pursued a different architectural path, developing a topological qubit approach that the company argues will be more stable than the superconducting circuits used by IBM and Google. The company released its Azure Quantum cloud platform in 2019, providing access to quantum hardware from multiple vendors through a single interface. Intel has produced a 49-qubit quantum processor called Tangle Lake, though the chipmaker has been less vocal than its competitors about near-term commercial deployment.
The startup landscape has been equally active. Rigetti Computing, founded in 2013, went public in 2022 via a SPAC merger.
IonQ, founded in 2015, went public in 2021 through a similar SPAC transaction and announced a 32-qubit quantum computer in 2023. Quantinuum, formed in 2021 from the merger of Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum, has focused on trapped-ion technology and quantum software. D-Wave Systems, founded in 1999, has taken a distinct approach, concentrating on quantum annealing — a method suited to optimization problems rather than general-purpose quantum computation.
Federal Investment and the Road Ahead
The U.S. government has invested over $1 billion through the National Quantum Initiative Act of 2018, a bipartisan measure that established quantum information science as a national priority. That funding has flowed to research institutions, national laboratories, and private-sector partnerships. On the timeline, the industry now stands at a point where hardware scale — measured in qubits — has increased dramatically, but the path to error correction and fault-tolerant quantum computing remains undefined.
IBM, Google, Microsoft, and the startups each advocate different technical routes, and no single approach has yet demonstrated a clear advantage for practical, commercially relevant problems. What to watch next: the next round of processor announcements from IBM and Google, any update on Microsoft’s topological qubit progress, and whether the startup cohort can sustain its pace of public-market fundraising.
The National Quantum Initiative is up for reauthorization, and sources familiar with the process expect continued bipartisan support.
