Quantum computers with 50 logical qubits are expected to emerge within the next five years, according to Sebastian Hassinger, host of The New Quantum Era podcast and author of the book by the same name.
He believes this will be a “point of no return,” after which classical simulation methods will become ineffective.
Hassinger shared this forecast during a special edition of the Quantum Computing Report in a conversation with Yuval Boger, Chief Commercial Officer of QuEra Computing. The expert, who spent about 10 years at IBM Quantum and AWS, focused on his own consulting project, The New Quantum Era, starting in early 2026.
According to Hassinger’s assessment, the technology development roadmap will be as follows:
- Short-term: Advantage of neutral atom systems;
- Medium-term: Dominance of superconducting qubits;
- Long-term: Emergence of spin and photonic solutions.
Hassinger noted that platforms based on neutral atoms show excellent scaling and error correction (LDPC codes), but their “Achilles’ heel” remains a lower operational clock speed compared to superconducting systems.
Boger described his colleague’s forecast as “conservative,” recalling recent successes by Harvard and QuEra in demonstrating 48 logical qubits. He referred to the opinion of QuEra’s CTO Vladan Vuletic, who extended his confidence horizon in the leadership of neutral atoms from five to 10 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 supremacy.
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 develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer with 100 logical qubits by 2032.