Inside CERN's quest to build a reliable quantum computing device, as it'll need 50-100 times more computing power to process Large Hadron Collider data by 2026
Katia Moskvitch / WIRED UK : Tweets: @turiciencia Tweets: Leonid Leiva / @turiciencia : What really counts in the race to build a useful, powerful #QuantumComputer. Spoiler alert: It's not @Google's touted #QuantumSupremacy #QuantumAdvantage @IBMResearch @SciTech_Cat https://www.wired.co.uk/...
Context & Ripple Effects
WIRED UK's report frames CERN not as a quantum pioneer chasing headlines but as a customer with a hard deadline: processing Large Hadron Collider data will require 50–100 times more computing power by 2026, and the piece argues that what counts is reliability — not Google's touted quantum supremacy milestone. That framing puts CERN alongside the corporate labs racing to make machines actually usable.
The vendor landscape around it has since sharpened: IBM's Jay Gambetta has laid out a plan for a 100,000-qubit machine within ten years, Intel shipped its first research-oriented processor with Tunnel Falls, a 12-qubit electron-based chip aimed at academic partners, and surveys of IBM, Google, and Microsoft's competing approaches show the field still split on how to get there. CERN's demand gives all of them a concrete, non-commercial workload to design against.
First-order effects
- CERN faces a compute-capacity gap for LHC data by 2026 that classical infrastructure alone must close or supplement, pushing the lab to invest directly in building a reliable quantum device rather than waiting on commercial availability.
Second-order effects
- Vendors gain a demanding anchor tenant: IBM's long-horizon qubit roadmap and Intel's decision to route Tunnel Falls to select academic and research partners both point to big-science customers shaping what gets built, while rival approaches at Google and Microsoft compete to prove their architecture can meet reliability thresholds first.
Third-order effects
- If mission-driven buyers like CERN keep setting the requirements, the industry's success metric shifts from supremacy demonstrations to dependable, application-grade machines — a shift with structural consequences, since the same machines capable of such workloads are the ones flagged in broader coverage as able to break current encryption protocols.
The trend: Quantum computing is being pulled from supremacy demos toward reliability-first engineering, with large scientific institutions acting as the demand signal that disciplines vendor roadmaps.