BCG: enterprise users spent a total of $300M on quantum computing in 2025, outranking the combined spending of research labs and governments for the first time
Many companies are pouring millions into quantum computing programs to gain a competitive edge and prepare for future encryption threats
Context & Ripple Effects
Quantum investment has moved from a research-led financing story—where startups had already drawn substantial private funding—to one in which companies are becoming the largest spending constituency. The UK’s planned quantum research funding for industry shows governments still backing commercialization across pharmaceuticals, finance, and energy.
The enterprise-spending milestone arrives as IBM is pursuing a five-year, $10B-plus quantum investment plan while the field still lacks agreement on a practical qubit approach. That makes paying customers’ priorities—competitive applications and encryption preparation—a more consequential signal than research ambition alone.
First-order effects
- Enterprise users become the largest quantum-computing spending group in 2025, giving their application and encryption-preparation requirements greater weight in providers’ commercial roadmaps.
- Companies spending on quantum programs now bear a more immediate budget and execution burden as they seek advantage before the technology has reached a broadly agreed technical architecture.
Second-order effects
- Quantum providers, including IBM, gain a clearer commercial rationale for large development programs, but must compete for enterprise budgets by addressing use cases and security planning rather than research performance alone.
- Government programs such as the UK’s industry-oriented funding are increasingly complementary to, rather than the primary source of, quantum demand as companies finance adoption preparation themselves.
Third-order effects
- If enterprise spending continues to outpace public and lab budgets, quantum computing’s development agenda will tilt toward deployable systems and buyer-defined requirements, even while the underlying qubit path remains unsettled.
- The market may increasingly reward providers able to translate frontier hardware investment into enterprise-ready services, concentrating influence among companies that control both the quantum systems stack and customer access.
The trend: Quantum computing is shifting from publicly supported research and startup financing toward enterprise-led commercialization, with security readiness and competitive applications shaping demand.