Research published in 2021 by scientists Craig Gidney at Google in Santa Barbara, California, and Martin Ekerå at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, estimates that breaking state-of-the-art cryptography in 8 hours would require 20 million qubits3.
This is where the scepticism about quantum computing begins. The world’s largest quantum computer in terms of qubits is IBM’s Osprey, which has 433. But even with 2 million qubits, some quantum chemistry calculations might take a century, according to a 2022 preprint2 by researchers at Microsoft Quantum in Redmond, Washington, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Research published in 2021 by scientists Craig Gidney at Google in Santa Barbara, California, and Martin Ekerå at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, estimates that breaking state-of-the-art cryptography in 8 hours would require 20 million qubits3.