The quantum computing market surged in 2022, with valuations now forecast to reach $5 billion by 2025. To get you up to speed, we present SDxCentral's top five quantum computing stories for 2022.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in July revealed the first group of winners from its post-quantum cryptography competition. And the institute is looking to expand and diversify the selections and set the foundation for international standards.

NIST selected the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm for general encryption, which is used to protect information exchanged across a public network. For digital signatures, often used for identity authentication during a digital transaction or to sign a document remotely, NIST selected the CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, and SPHINCS+ algorithms.

The institute expects to publish its post-quantum cryptography standard by 2024. The institute then will recommend the rest of the federal governments use the standard. Certain industries will typically follow those standards because they do business with the federal government.

IBM in November unveiled the largest quantum bit count (433 qubits) of its quantum computers to date.

The IBM Osprey more than tripled the qubit count of its predecessor, which was the 127-qubit Eagle processor that launched in 2021. The company claims Osprey is more powerful to run complex computations and the number of classical bits needed to represent a state on this latest processor far exceeds the total number of atoms in the known universe.

IBM quantum VP Jay Gambetta noted IBM has been following along its quantum technology development roadmap. The company put its first quantum computer on the cloud in 2016, and aims to launch its first 1,000-plus qubit quantum processor (Condor) next year, and a 4,000-plus qubit processor around 2025.

The quantum computing development competition between the top two largest economies in the world is expected to drive the market value to $5 billion by 2025, GlobalData reported. The firm noted the U.S. is about five years ahead of China, but China is catching up quickly.

GlobalData’s patent analytics database showed that the U.S.- based tech organizations are leading the patent number in quantum computing. The top three companies that filed the most patents are IBM (1,885 total publications), Alphabet (1,000), and Northrop Grumman (623).

On top of the progress from the private sector, the U.S. government has been making strides to support development. The federal government has committed $3 billion in funding for quantum projects, such as the $1.2 billion National Quantum Computing initiative.

The Chinese government is also pumping money into quantum computing development including a $10 billion investment to construct the National Laboratory for Quantum Information Science.

Building “big enough” quantum computers is a big engineering challenge with numerous constraints, ColdQuanta VP Bob Sutor noted during this year's Inside Quantum Technology event. Sutor explained that the biggest hurdles were making at least tens of thousands of functional quantum bits (qubits) with low error rates, qubit interconnection, and multiple quantum cores connections.

Breaking existing encryption systems in a relatively short time requires millions of qubits, but today’s largest quantum computing systems operate with only several hundred qubits, Sutor pointed out in his talk.

Sutor also explained the industry should pay attention to quantum cores.

“We’re only going to be able to make quantum devices that reach a certain size,” he said. “But there is a limit, and the limit is relatively small relative to the hundreds of thousands or millions of qubits we’re going to need, so if I say I can fit 1,000 qubits in this device, but I need 500,000 of them, [then] I got a problem.”

Plus, “big enough” quantum systems will need multiple cores, chips, qubit arrays, and ion traps, Sutor noted. Moreover, those need to be connected using quantum interconnects.

“We have to entangle across these things," Sutor said. "We need to build a bigger quantum computer by being able to do quantum operations among smaller quantum cores, and this is how we will grow.”

Colin Soutar, managing director of Deloitte's Risk & Financial Advisory, and Itan Barmes, specialist leader at Deloitte, joined SDxCentral Editor Nancy Liu to discuss quantum security on the SDxCentral 7 Layers podcast.

Soutar and Barmes answered some frequently asked questions about quantum security, such as what it's going to take to break current cryptography with a quantum computer and why we shouldn’t fixate on the number of qubits might be needed to break crypto-security or as a measure of progress?