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On one cross-platform benchmark, Google's Willow ran about 66,000 times as many operations per second as Quantinuum's Helios-1, and Helios-1 ran circuits about seven times as large. Each vendor headlines the axis it leads on.
Are the qubits physical or logical? Is there a paper, and who checked it? A reader can judge a quantum computing announcement with seven questions, each shown here with a 2026 case and the document that answers it.
The four join Microsoft and PsiQuantum in Stage C, where government evaluators test whether a proposed utility-scale machine can be built as designed. Of the four, only Diraq disclosed its initial funding, $51 million for the next year.
Microsoft and Qolab researchers would call a logical qubit scalable only if a machine sustains it with repeated error correction and decodes errors in real time. DOE plans to pay for logical qubits under counting methods negotiated with each company.
PsiQuantum signed a $125 million expanded DARPA agreement in July. Like Microsoft, it entered the final stage of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative through US2QC, a related program, without passing through the initiative's first two stages.
Azure CTO Mark Russinovich cited quantum research progress and U.S. and French government actions. In its 2025 roadmap, Microsoft had aimed to complete the transition by 2033 and to enable early adoption by 2029.
Henry Legg of the University of St Andrews disputed a 2025 Microsoft paper, citing coding errors and omitted data. Microsoft researchers called one error a minor bug. Microsoft's Chetan Nayak said the company stands by its results.
The team measured fewer logical errors in the larger of two codes, built from 64 physical qubits, over up to eight rounds. Over longer runs, the authors concluded only that logical error rates did not grow with code distance.
Microsoft's researchers replaced aluminum with lead in their nanowire devices. The company now aims for a scalable, practical quantum computer by 2029. Henry Legg of the University of St Andrews said the preprint does not resolve the fundamental issues.
