What Arrived First

Jason Palmer wrote a survey of quantum technology for The Economist's Technology Quarterly in early 2017. The dating is easy to check. It says China launched the Micius satellite "last August", that a cyber-security firm bought a D-Wave machine "in January", and that Google may demonstrate quantum supremacy "this year".

Palmer starts with timing. The caesium clock developed at NPL was, in his phrase, arguably the world's first quantum technology, and Britain did not exploit it in the market; an American firm commercialised it a year after the device was invented. The prediction attached to the smaller clocks was that better timing could vastly outdo GPS for navigation and help find what lies underground. Microchip lists the SA65 chip-scale atomic clock as a catalogue part at ±3E-10 temperature stability, with a space-qualified version added in August 2026. The specification answers the performance half of that prediction. Whether anyone navigates by one is not something a datasheet settles.

RSK, an environmental consultancy, was working with the University of Birmingham on fieldworthy sensors "in the hope of deploying them", and other work had "drawn interest" from Schlumberger, an oilfield-services giant, and Bridgeporth, a surveying firm. Military types were interested too, and David Delpy, who then led Britain's Defence Scientific Advisory Council, put it as "you can't shield gravity", describing the goal as "a kind of Google Maps for gravitation". Exail says more than thirty of its absolute quantum gravimeters are in operation worldwide. Nomad Atomics takes the other route, offering access to one through a geophysical surveying service.

Magnetometers built on nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond served as one of the essay's examples of near-term sensing. SBQuantum builds a hand-held diamond magnetometer at about 400 pT/√Hz with sub-5 nanotesla accuracy, and launched one into space in March 2026 for the American geospatial agency's MagQuest competition. Qnami makes scanning NV microscopes, which use the same defect as a probe on a bench.

Quantum key distribution came with a customer list. ID Quantique had installed links between the data centres of KPN, a Dutch telecoms firm; of Battelle, an American research non-profit; and of Hyposwiss and Notenstein, two Swiss private banks. Palmer gave the Chinese network a commercial bank, the banking regulator and the Xinhua news agency among its customers, and then quoted the American air force's Scientific Advisory Board, which suggested QKD had "little advantage over the best classical alternatives".

ID Quantique is still building that hardware. In February 2026 it supplied the QKD systems for Romania's national network, 36 quantum-secured links spanning more than 1,500km, which the company says is more than a fifth of Europe's terrestrial quantum communications infrastructure. NIST approved three post-quantum standards in August 2024. Cloudflare reports that about 70 percent of browser traffic reaching its network uses hybrid ML-KEM, against about 15 percent of the origin servers behind it. A study for the Internet Measurement Conference put post-quantum key exchange on 49 percent of 684,494 domains, with no post-quantum certificates in use in the same study. The key exchange now in use is X25519MLKEM768; the essay described New Hope, an earlier protocol from PQCRYPTO.

Palmer treated computing as the speculative end, and reported supremacy as something Google might reach within the year. Google published one in October 2019, two years after that estimate, and followed it in December 2024 with a Willow result showing a surface code below threshold, where adding physical qubits improved the logical qubit. In October 2025 the same chip ran Quantum Echoes, which Google calls the first verifiable quantum advantage: a task its collaborators estimate would take a supercomputer 13,000 times longer.

IBM's Quantum Experience was offered as an indication that these machines would be rented rather than owned. IBM gives away ten minutes of runtime a month, AWS Braket offers time on IonQ, Rigetti, IQM and QuEra hardware by the shot, and Azure Quantum offers monthly subscriptions. Every one of those is a rental. Willow, the chip behind those results, is not among the machines on offer; access to it runs through research proposals.

Public money was already flowing in 2017: a British programme worth £270m and a European Union commitment of €1bn, with defence departments adding more where a technology had security implications. In May 2026 the American Commerce Department signed letters of intent for $2.013 billion under the CHIPS Act across nine companies, under which it would receive a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each: $1 billion to IBM for a quantum foundry, $375 million to GlobalFoundries, and $38 million to $100 million each to seven others.

The scoreboard

Editorial

In 2017 the gravimeter was a sensor RSK hoped to deploy, and the magnetometer was a laboratory technique in diamond. Both are catalogue parts now, sold with datasheets.

Cryptography split. Romania's national network is what the hardware became: 36 links, built by the company that installed the Swiss private-bank links in 2017. The software went into the browser instead, and the air force board's scepticism never applied to it.

Supremacy came two years late. Below-threshold error correction came in December 2024, and a verifiable advantage in October 2025. The useful machine has not, and Google's own next milestone is a long-lived logical qubit.

Britain's £270m and Europe's €1bn bought research programmes. The CHIPS awards buy equity, and the American government is taking a stake in the industry it is trying to build.