2026-27 set to be key for quantum industry growth

A plurality (39%) of the respondents expects their customers to begin using QCs for production/operational purposes in 2026, up from 14% in 2025, and only 4% in 2024. This marks a key shift as most purchases of QC products and services to date, have been aimed at learning and experimenting with the technology to better understand its potential and relevance to their respective challenges. For the market to flourish, however, a transition from experimentation and testing to practical application and deployment will be necessary.

Second, and relatedly, a majority (56%) of respondents believe 2026 will be the year QCs begin to show a clear economic advantage such as improved speed, efficiency, higher quality, or lower cost compared to purely classical computing solutions. Omdia Chief Analyst for Quantum Computing, Sam Lucero, explains: “It is important to note that this is not a claim of QCs making classically intractable problems tractable with QCs, but rather that an increasing number of commercially relevant use cases will begin to emerge, demonstrating clear advantages for QCs.”

Third, a very slight plurality (29%) of respondents indicated that 2027 would be the first year that a commercially available QC will achieve at least 100 logical qubits with a minimum of 99.999% logical fidelity for 2-qubit gate operations. This level of performance could enable QCs to start to begin demonstrating computational advantages over classical computers, at least in a narrow range of initial use cases.

“While this is an encouraging result, Omdia has noted that 25% of respondents indicated 2029 would be the first year this milestone would be achieved, with another 25% forecasting it for 2030 or later,” concluded Lucero.