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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.
Quantinuum has reported logical-qubit counts of 94, 50, 48, and one on the same machine with 98 physical qubits, from four different experiments. With five questions, a reader can tell what most such announcements demonstrated.
Quantinuum's team cut logical errors about 12-fold with each step up in code distance on the 98-qubit trapped-ion machine, for one stored logical qubit. The preprint has not been peer reviewed.
Commerce holds stakes in five companies through its CHIPS quantum awards and releases award money as they meet milestones. DOE and DARPA pay for demonstrated or verified progress. The government is now an owner as well as a funder.
A Sandia-led team scored Google, IBM, and Quantinuum processors and a logical-qubit machine on one scale. Helios-1 led at 1,504 without discarded runs, against about 250 million that the authors calculated for factoring RSA-2048.
For D-Wave, Rigetti, and Quantinuum, Commerce makes 44% to 56% of each $100 million available at the start and releases the remainder as the companies meet project milestones over up to five years.
Quantinuum's team encoded two logical qubits in 20 physical data qubits on its Helios machine and beat unencoded baselines without discarding runs. The team decoded errors after the runs and ran no non-Clifford gates.
IBM and University of Chicago researchers claimed advantage with a certified fidelity bound on 97 physical qubits. Qedma and Algorithmiq reported regimes in which the classical methods they tested became unreliable or disagreed. None of the preprints is peer reviewed.
Twenty authors tied quantum chemistry and topological data analysis to Helios, Sol in 2027, Apollo in 2029, and Lumos in the 2030s. They called the roadmap an assumption-driven envelope, not a deterministic forecast.
