2026-27 Would Be the Key Inflection Point for Quantum Industry

Quantum computing (QC) vendors face a long and challenging road to large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers (FTQC), according to a recent Omdia survey. The analytics company surveyed 28 QC vendors headquartered in North America, Europe, Asia & Oceania, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa.

The study suggests that 2026-27 will mark a key inflection point for the industry on several important measures of progress. This view is supported by the recent uptick in industry progress regarding error correction development.

A plurality (39%) of the respondents expect 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. “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,” explained Sam Lucero, Omdia Chief Analyst for Quantum Computing.

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 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.