Quantum Computing Study Finds 89 Per Cent Of Enterprises Now Hands-On But Scaled Deployment Remains Rare

Nearly nine in ten enterprises surveyed are now actively working with quantum computing, yet only 3 per cent have reached scaled deployment, according to a new industry study that argues early movers are building a capability advantage that later entrants will find difficult to close.

The State of Quantum 2026 report, published by IQM Quantum Computers with research independently conducted by The Quantum Insider, draws on tracked transaction data from 2021 to the first quarter of 2026, a validated survey of 107 senior practitioners across the Americas, EMEA and APAC, and 19 in-depth interviews with leaders at organisations including Airbus, BMW, Moderna, Deutsche Bahn, Argonne National Laboratory and the Oxford Quantum Institute.

The central finding is that the quantum computing market has shifted from a question of whether organisations can access a quantum system to whether they can build something useful around one. While 89 per cent of respondents reported hands-on quantum work, only 10 per cent reported limited production use and just 3 per cent have reached scaled deployment.

Capability Gap Emerges As Central Challenge

The report documents what it describes as a growing gap between quantum access and quantum capability. Momentum is rising across the industry, but the work of converting access into usable, production-ready capability has barely begun.

The study introduces the Quantum Readiness Index, a composite score across four dimensions – Workforce, Innovation, Investment and Adoption – mapped to five tiers from Aware to Leading. The global cohort scores 58 out of 100, placing it in the “Developing” tier, meaning the market has moved beyond awareness and early exploration but is not yet prepared for scaled adoption.

The pattern within the score is notable. Hiring, budgets and pilot programs are more advanced than proprietary output or scaled deployment. Only 9 per cent of surveyed organisations reported a resourced intellectual property program, suggesting that while organisations are experimenting with quantum systems, few are generating proprietary results from that work.

Alex Challans, Chief Executive Officer of The Quantum Insider, argued the market’s questions have matured.

“A year ago, people were still asking whether quantum investment had peaked. This year’s report closes that debate,” Challans stated.

“Capital is arriving at scale, and it is going to the companies with demonstrated results behind their roadmaps. The question now is not whether there is money in quantum. It is whether your organisation is building the capability to be ready when that investment turns into a commercial product.”

On-Premises Infrastructure Gaining Traction

The study found that roughly 46 per cent of buyers expect on-premises infrastructure to form part of their quantum access model within three years, compared with 24 per cent favouring public cloud alone.

The report characterised this shift as a move by buyers away from evaluating quantum systems by qubit counts and toward asking whether they can see into a machine, calibrate it, integrate it with existing systems and retain the capability they develop.

This distinction matters because of timing, the report argued. Quantum advantage is not delivered at the point of installation. It is built incrementally through trained personnel, algorithms written for specific problems and operational experience accumulated over successive cycles, none of which can be assembled quickly after the fact.

Vendor roadmaps across all major modalities now converge on a 2029 to 2031 window for fault-tolerant quantum computing, making the intervening years the period in which capability must be built.

Jan Goetz, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of IQM Quantum Computers, framed the urgency in the report’s foreword.

“The quantum future is closer than it looks,” Goetz wrote.

“The work of being ready for it starts now. The organisations holding out for a clear signal tend to find the signal and the deadline show up on the same morning.”

Skills Identified As Primary Bottleneck

The report identified workforce skills as the most consistent barrier to quantum adoption, rather than hardware limitations. Skills were cited by 66 per cent or more of large enterprises, universities and government buyers as a constraint.

The second most significant barrier was algorithm design rather than qubit immaturity, a finding that suggests the challenge has shifted from building quantum systems to figuring out what to do with them in specific business contexts.

Workforce training takes two to five years according to the report, and the pipeline does not grow unless organisations begin investing now. This creates a structural advantage for early movers that later entrants will find difficult to replicate, as the talent, integration experience and proprietary learning developed during the pre-fault-tolerance period cannot be quickly acquired.

Investment Reaches $8.3 Billion As Capital Rewards Execution

Quantum computing drew $8.3 billion in investment in 2025, nearly five times the prior year, according to the report’s transaction data. The increase was driven by deal size rather than deal count, which held broadly flat.

The report attributed the surge to procurement activity rather than speculation, with investors rewarding verifiable milestones over roadmap ambition.

A structural shift toward public markets is also underway. Seven quantum computing companies have completed SPAC mergers since 2021, with a second wave through 2025 and into 2026. IQM itself is nearing a planned listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market through its merger with Real Asset Acquisition Corp, which the company described as intended to make it the first publicly listed European quantum company on Nasdaq in the US.

Procurement Criteria Evolving

The report tracked a shift in how buyers evaluate quantum vendors. Openness, calibration access and co-development quality are becoming more important factors in procurement decisions, while black-box systems that do not allow customers to build their own capability are increasingly falling out of favour.

Sovereignty requirements in Europe and the Gulf are reinforcing this pattern, with local data residency and host-country control becoming formal procurement conditions.

On market position, the report’s transaction data found that IQM leads vendors with 19 per cent of quantum computing contracts from 2021 to the first quarter of 2026, and leads all tracked vendors in national high-performance computing quantum deployments between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, with nine installations across six countries.

Australia Among Second Tier Of Target Markets

The report’s geographic breakdown of quantum activity places the United States and Europe as the primary markets for quantum computing investment and adoption, with APAC – including Australia – representing a growing area of activity.

Australian organisations with investments in high-performance computing and national research infrastructure face the same capability-building challenge identified in the global data: early investment in workforce development, algorithm design and integration experience will determine readiness for production-scale quantum computing when fault-tolerant systems arrive.

The full State of Quantum 2026 report is available as a free download and includes the complete Quantum Readiness Index methodology, regional breakdowns and recommendations for enterprise leaders, policymakers, HPC centres, investors and academic institutions.

The research was authored by The Quantum Insider, a Resonance company headquartered in Toronto, and supported by OpenOcean, a pan-European early-stage venture capital firm. IQM Quantum Computers, which published the report, is headquartered in Finland with operations in Munich and has more than 400 employees operating across Europe, Asia and North America.

Last Updated on June 18, 2026 by Nick Ross