The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) and Hyperion Research are projecting that the global quantum computing (QC) market – worth an estimated $320 million in 2020 – will grow at an anticipated 27% CAGR between 2020 and 2024, reaching approximately $830 million by 2024.

This estimate is based on surveys of 135 US-based quantum computing researchers, developers and suppliers across the academic, commercial and government sectors. Supplemental data and insights came from a companion effort that surveyed 115 current and potential quantum computing users in North America, Europe and the Asia/Pacific region on their expectations, schedules and budgets for the use of quantum computing in their existing and planned computational workloads.

(Keeping track of the various quantum computing organization is becoming a challenge in itself. The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) is a consortium of stakeholders that aims to enable and grow the U.S. quantum industry. QED-C was established with support from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as part of the Federal strategy for advancing quantum information science and as called for by the National Quantum Initiative Act enacted in 2018.)

Additional results from the study:

• Market revenues for QC hardware delivered for either on-prem or public cloud-based use will comprise about 50% of the global QC market for the next three years, followed by QC professional services, QC application software and QC middleware (see figure below).
• The three main algorithms driving QC usage will be optimization, physical simulation and machine learning, each near equally sharing overall market presence.
• The top three QC user sectors cited as most promising in the next three years were the QC industry, government laboratories and defense, followed by a range of commercial users including those in the pharmaceutical, chemical, biosciences and financial sectors.
• In the near-term, Noise Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers will be the architecture of choice, followed by quantum annealers and digital simulators. Universal error-corrected gate model systems will garner only about 12% of overall QC market in the next few years.

“Based on our study and related forecast, there is a growing, vibrant, and diverse US-based QC research, development, and commercial ecosystem that shows the promise of maturing into a viable, if not profitable and self-sustaining industry. That said, it is too early to start picking winners and losers from either a technology or commercial perspective,” said Bob Sorensen, quantum analyst for Hyperion Research.

“A key driver for commercial success could be the ability of any vendor to ease the requirements needed to integrate QC technology into a larger HPC and enterprise IT user base while still supporting advanced QC-related research for a more targeted, albeit smaller, class of end-user scientists and engineers. This sector is not for faint of heart, but this forecast gives some sense of what is at stake here—at least for the next few years,” noted Sorensen.

Source: QED-C

QED-C commissioned and collaborated with Hyperion Research to develop this market forecast to help inform decision making for QC technology developers and suppliers, national-level QC-related policy makers, potential QC users in both the advanced computing and enterprise IT marketplace investors and commercial QC funding organizations. This is a baseline estimate, and Hyperion Research and QED-C are looking to provide periodic updates of their QC market forecast as events, information, or decision- making requirements dictate. Contact: Celia Merzbacher, QED-C Deputy Director, [email protected]