Quantum Computing — Is It Really Coming in 5 Years?

I've Been Hearing "5 Years Away" for 8 Years

I've been hearing that quantum computing will be practical within 5 years since 2018. Eight years later, it's still "5 years away."

It smells like fusion energy. Always seems close, but the closer you get, the further it retreats.

That said, recent progress is qualitatively different from before. It used to be all about increasing qubit counts. Now there's been real progress on error correction — the core challenge. 2025 might have actually been a genuine turning point for quantum computing.

The Numbers Look Impressive

IBM announced the 1,121-qubit Condor in 2025 and demonstrated a 100-logical-qubit system with error correction applied. Google claimed their Willow chip solved a computation in 5 minutes that would take a classical computer 10^25 years.

But there's important context here.

These computations are specialized problems optimized for quantum computers. Quantum circuit sampling — a type of problem that inherently favors quantum machines. There's still no case where a quantum computer has outperformed a classical one on a general-purpose problem actually used in industry.

It's important to remember that "quantum utility" and "quantum advantage" are different concepts. (Way too many articles fail to make this distinction.)

Everyone Says Quantum Computing Will Change the World

But the actual domains where it's applicable are extremely limited.

There are roughly three areas where quantum computers can genuinely outperform classical ones: molecular simulation, optimization problems, and cryptography breaking. For most other computing tasks, classical computers are more efficient. There's no reason to run a web server on a quantum computer. A quantum machine won't process your DB queries any faster.

A few pharmaceutical companies are experimenting with molecular simulation, but according to IBM's reports, results are still on par with or slightly better than classical simulations.

On the Gartner Hype Cycle, quantum computing is entering the Trough of Disillusionment, and VC investment has dropped from $2.3 billion at its 2022 peak to $1.4 billion in 2025. The hype is deflating, and expectations are adjusting to reality.

Security Is a Different Story

Most software developers won't be directly affected by quantum computing for the next 5-10 years. Honestly, there's not much to prepare for right now.

But security is the exception.

It's theoretically certain that quantum computers can break public-key cryptography like RSA and ECC. NIST already published post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024, and Google Chrome has been applying post-quantum key exchange in TLS since 2024. AWS is rolling it out across major services too.

There's also the "Harvest now, decrypt later" attack. The idea is to collect encrypted data now and decrypt it once quantum computers become practical. Intelligence agencies are already preparing for this. (When you think about it, it's a pretty terrifying scenario.)

If you're a security-focused developer, you should start studying post-quantum cryptography now.

So Is It Coming in 5 Years?

IBM's roadmap targets 100,000 qubits by 2029, but there's almost no tech company in history that has actually hit its roadmap targets.

Realistically, limited commercial applications will probably start in the early 2030s, and mainstream adoption is more likely in the late 2030s or beyond.

My answer is "no, but it might arrive faster than we think." Most experts didn't predict the pace of progress before Google dropped Willow.

Quantum computing is definitely a question of when, not if — but exactly when that "when" is, honestly nobody knows. That's just how predictions work in this field.