Telefónica Tech partnered with IBM to bolster quantum-safe protections, a move underscored by IBM’s co-development of two NIST post-quantum cryptography standards. The PKI Consortium’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Conference, with 2,191 participants, urged immediate migration, while Bill Gates forecast game-changing quantum solutions in three to five years, contrasting Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg’s longer timelines. India added ₹600 crore to its National Quantum Mission, and IBM declared $1 billion in quantum deals, surpassing IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave’s combined Q3 2024 revenue (hell, combined lifelong revenue!). D-Wave launched its “Quantum Realized” campaign to spotlight practical optimization solutions, and Quantinuum unveiled a generative quantum AI strategy with major commercial implications. On the research side, Martin Hayhurst Appel’s team demonstrated a GaAs quantum dot register of 13,000 nuclear spins, achieving 68.6% fidelity and up to 20ms storage via dynamical decoupling. Yuxuan Du and colleagues introduced “Quantum Machine Learning: A Hands-on Tutorial,” integrating quantum kernel methods with neural networks for more efficient AI.