Microsoft officialy launched their Quantum Development Kit, competing directly with IBM and Qiskit for developer attention. It is good to have an alternative after what IBM has done lobotimizing Qiskit.
Rigetti Computing India secured an $8.4 million deal with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing for a 108-qubit quantum computer. D-Wave Quantum acquired Quantum Circuits, establishing itself as the first company to provide both annealing and gate-model quantum computing platforms (although companies like Qilimanjaro could make somewhat similar claims). Additionally, Horizon Quantum Computing and Alice & Bob entered a strategic partnership to integrate cat qubit-based quantum error correction technology. A&B researchers also introduced “elevator codes” for quantum error correction that showed over 50 percent qubit overhead reduction for hardware with high noise bias, leveraging recent advancements in cat qubit experimentations.
Qcentroid launched a multi-agent Artificial Intelligence tool to help organizations systematically identify evidence-based quantum use cases, directly addressing adoption barriers highlighted in recent surveys. The University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, with support from partners such as Xanadu and Haiqu, announced Open Quantum Design, the first open-source full stack quantum computer. Let’s go 2026!
A bit of history: 1st: ‘computers’ were people trained to solve complex problems (see movie “hidden figures”) 2nd: computers used to be big and expensive. They needed specially trained people to operate them. Then came mini-computers which took up less space, but had limited function and were used to control machines (look up Naked Mini). Then Intel decided rather than use a complex custom circuit to use a programmable system to, if my memory server, run a Mainframe disk drive. A couple of hobbyists wrote an article for Popular Electronics using that processor and a bunch of 100 pin connectors (because they found those on sale for the 50 or so kits they thought they would sell) They got a thousand orders within a week and the hobby computer craze started. A couple of kids in California though they could sell pre-built hobby computers for those who didn’t want to solder their own and allowed others to write programs for it (you may have heard of that company…Apple).
Up until this point if you wanted more than one person to have access to a computer (or wait in line for hours to access the mainframe, you had to connect using a simple keyboard and monitor setup.
While we now can have in our hands computers which are far more capable than the old mainframes there are somethings that your desktop can’t provide: reliability and scale. A computer center (whether its company owned, shared or a cloud center) has is redundant communications links, 24/7 power with regularly tested backups and the reliable hot swappable components. On a mainframe you can replace processors, memory , mass storage without shutting anything down. On a smaller scale, what looks like a tower computer, if its a server will have redundant power supplies, error correcting memory and mass storage which can support disk failure with replacement disk able to be swapped in and the system restored in the background. What happens when say the redundancy fails, major airlines have to stand down operations for several days. What happens if the bank’’s data center fails, all their ATMs stop issuing money.
Hey, great read as always. This update on quantum is super helpful! The Qcentroid AI tool for finding use cases realy hit home. Adoption is such a big hurdle, so leveraging AI there makes a lot of sense. Very smart!
A bit of history: 1st: ‘computers’ were people trained to solve complex problems (see movie “hidden figures”) 2nd: computers used to be big and expensive. They needed specially trained people to operate them. Then came mini-computers which took up less space, but had limited function and were used to control machines (look up Naked Mini). Then Intel decided rather than use a complex custom circuit to use a programmable system to, if my memory server, run a Mainframe disk drive. A couple of hobbyists wrote an article for Popular Electronics using that processor and a bunch of 100 pin connectors (because they found those on sale for the 50 or so kits they thought they would sell) They got a thousand orders within a week and the hobby computer craze started. A couple of kids in California though they could sell pre-built hobby computers for those who didn’t want to solder their own and allowed others to write programs for it (you may have heard of that company…Apple).
Up until this point if you wanted more than one person to have access to a computer (or wait in line for hours to access the mainframe, you had to connect using a simple keyboard and monitor setup.
While we now can have in our hands computers which are far more capable than the old mainframes there are somethings that your desktop can’t provide: reliability and scale. A computer center (whether its company owned, shared or a cloud center) has is redundant communications links, 24/7 power with regularly tested backups and the reliable hot swappable components. On a mainframe you can replace processors, memory , mass storage without shutting anything down. On a smaller scale, what looks like a tower computer, if its a server will have redundant power supplies, error correcting memory and mass storage which can support disk failure with replacement disk able to be swapped in and the system restored in the background. What happens when say the redundancy fails, major airlines have to stand down operations for several days. What happens if the bank’’s data center fails, all their ATMs stop issuing money.
Hey, great read as always. This update on quantum is super helpful! The Qcentroid AI tool for finding use cases realy hit home. Adoption is such a big hurdle, so leveraging AI there makes a lot of sense. Very smart!
Thank you so much for your post, the part about Open Quantum Design is the one that interested me the most