New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever

Home New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever Read Later Share Copied! Comments Read Later Read Later quantum computing New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever By Charlie Wood April 3, 2026 Two research groups say they have significantly reduced the amount of qubits and time required to crack common online security technologies. Read Later Introduction Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world. Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong. For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits. However, two different groups of researchers have just announced advances that notably reduce the gap between theoretical estimates and real machines. A star-studded team of quantum physicists at the California Institute of Technology went public with a design for a quantum computer that could break encryption with only tens of thousands of qubits and said that it had formed a company to build the machine. And researchers at Google announced that they had developed an implementa...