IEEE Quantum Conference (Albuquerque, Mexico), by Briana Bowen

 

The annual IEEE Quantum Week is one of the largest global convocations of quantum technology researchers, developers, and policymakers from across government, industry, and academia. Its sixth iteration, held from 31 August–5 September 2025 in Albuquerque, New Mexico (USA) reflected a mood of accelerating interest and hype around the quantum technologies domain, with especial focus on quantum computing, quantum algorithms, and quantum communications.

The last decade has been a transformative one for the maturing of quantum technologies from theoretical curiosities to early-stage commercially experimental applications, and real and important progress has been made across this time. But practical utility is still sharply limited: great hopes and grand claims about the future capabilities of quantum computers in particular run freely in the investment space around quantum technologies, but the actual capacity of current quantum computers—even those publicly available via quantum cloud computing—is still mostly constrained to experimental and research applications. As evident across 2025 IEEE Quantum Week discussions, many quantum computing developers’ eyes are now set on reaching the hazy goal of ‘quantum advantage’: itself a concept that has undergone significant evolution in semantics and meaning across the last decade, but which is starting to coalesce around new practical milestones achievable when a ‘quantum computer can run a computation more accurately, cheaply, or efficiently than a classical computer.’ Even more commercially mature technologies like quantum sensors have some way to go before they are a serious market force.

Notwithstanding this backdrop, the tone of keynotes, panels, and presentations across the 2025 IEEE Quantum Week reflected significant momentum and enthusiasm for advances being made across the quantum technologies domain, in particular building on major advances across the last five years in quantum error correction, increasing policy attention on quantum technologies across many states and international organisations, and growing investment in leading quantum technology companies. This reflects the broad multidisciplinary and multi-sector roster that IEEE Quantum Week attracts: academic researchers working in highly specialised subdisciplines of physics, engineering, and computer science; commercial developers pitching their latest experimental prototypes and breakthroughs; educators seeking to design curricula fit for purpose to train up the emerging quantum technology workforce, and government officials gathering information to steer policymaking and direct state investments.

Conference sessions reflected this lively heterogeneity among participants: some panels concentrated on bleeding-edge theoretical work that only a handful of experts even within the quantum community would grasp, while others considered front-end and general-facing challenges that overarch the whole community, like the challenge of effectively benchmarking progress across the hugely diverse quantum technologies landscape. Notably, the majority of the twice-daily keynote sessions were from commercial leaders heading major quantum computing R&D teams, including IBM, Microsoft, PsiQuantum, and Photonic Inc., highlighting the central role that private sector companies are taking in spearheading not only much of the applied but even basic science in the quantum technologies domain. This dynamic also presented an interesting challenge for attendees—much debated in post-keynote coffee groups—over how best to separate out the true state of the science from commercial marketing spin in such talks. The very nature of an event like IEEE Quantum Week means that many of the most vocal sceptics about the future of quantum technologies were not present in the week’s discussions, which further complicates taking an accurate temperature of attitudes across the huge spread of expert opinion in this domain. 

Surprisingly sparse attention was given across 2025 IEEE Quantum Week discussions to the potential threat that future cryptographically-relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) have been theorised to present to traditional public-key cryptography and weak forms of symmetric cryptography, presenting a sharp contrast between the prevailing tone of discussion among quantum technologists and information security professionals about future implications of this domain. Anticipated timelines for the plausible emergence of a CRQC remain widely contested even among leading experts. As a CDT PhD researcher, attending the 2025 IEEE Quantum Week offered rich front-row insights into the debates and advances that are propelling the quantum technologies frontier and underscored that, for now, the quantum horizon is full of possibility, promise, and potential threat, but above all uncertainty.