IBM CEO Foresees Quantum Computing Growth by 2029

IBM’s CEO says quantum computing will soon be a source of growth for the company. “I think that in 2028 or 2029, you’ll see it have a measurable impact on our top line and bottom line,” Arvind Krishna said in an interview with CNBC last week. “By the end of the 2030s, we are now pretty convinced this is a trillion dollars of value.” His comments came the same day IBM and startup Algorithmiq announced new research showing what the companies dubbed “quantum advantage.” This research “demonstrates that quantum computers can provide trusted solutions more efficiently, more cheaply, or more accurately than leading classical compute methods — which has long been considered a key milestone in the field,” the companies said. Krishna told CNBC his company’s quantum computer uncovered behaviors in materials that researchers had not been able to record using conventional computing, and that these findings could someday produce things like better batteries and advances in medicine. “A quantum computer can do things better, faster, cheaper, in a way that normal classical computers cannot do at this time,” Krishna said. The report added that although skeptics contend quantum computing is years away from having commercial benefits due to challenges like hardware complexity and scalability, Krishna said IBM had begun seeing meaningful movement toward real-world applications. The company in April unveiled two new hubs for developing artificial intelligence and quantum computing projects, one in Illinois and the other in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Weeks later, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced its intent to provide $2.013 billion in federal incentives to nine companies to support quantum computing efforts, with IBM getting nearly half of that money. This is happening amid debate about the security implications of quantum computing. Research from Google published earlier this year found that quantum computers capable of breaking encryption could arrive by 2029, much sooner than earlier forecasts putting that development at up to a decade away. “We want to raise awareness on this issue and are providing the cryptocurrency community with recommendations to improve security and stability before this is possible, including transitioning blockchains to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), which is resistant to quantum attacks,” Google researchers said in a report in March. As PYMNTS wrote at the time, this assertion goes against a popular narrative that decentralized systems are inherently more resilient. Google’s analysis underscores a structural imbalance, the report said: Traditional financial institutions can quietly update their cryptographic infrastructure, while public blockchains are bound by “transparency, immutability and social consensus.”