Real-World Quantum
Quantum Computing Case Studies
What does quantum computing look like in practice today? These cases cover real pilots, research deployments, and industry milestones - with the code and context that textbooks skip.
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bp: Quantum Computing for Seismic Imaging and Wave Physics
BP
bp and Quantinuum are collaborating on quantum-hybrid algorithms for the wave physics behind subsurface seismic imaging, building on an earlier feasibility pilot. bp has also been an Industry Partner in the IBM Quantum Network since 2021.
- Outcome
- Pilot demonstrated feasibility of the approach; the collaboration announced in May 2026 is now scaling to more complex subsurface properties. Research ongoing; no quantum advantage demonstrated yet.
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AstraZeneca: Quantum-Accelerated Chemistry Simulation for Drug Synthesis
AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca worked with IonQ, AWS, and NVIDIA on a hybrid quantum-classical workflow that simulated a Suzuki-Miyaura reaction, a chemical transformation widely used in small-molecule drug synthesis, combining IonQ's Forte quantum processor with GPU-accelerated classical computation.
- Outcome
- The collaboration demonstrated a large-scale, end-to-end simulation of a Suzuki-Miyaura reaction, described as the most complex chemical simulation run on IonQ hardware to date, and reported more than a 20x improvement in end-to-end time-to-solution versus previous implementations. This is a research demonstration; no production deployment has been announced.
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Microsoft Topological Qubit Breakthrough: Majorana Zero Modes in 2025
Microsoft
Microsoft demonstrated its first functional topological qubit based on Majorana zero modes in indium arsenide and aluminum nanowires, using the topological gap protocol (TGP) to confirm non-local qubit encoding that is theoretically protected from local noise without the overhead of conventional error correction.
- Outcome
- Demonstrated first functional topological qubit with measurable topological gap; coherence time and gate fidelity characterization ongoing for 2026 scale-up.
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Vodafone: Quantum Optimisation for Network Planning with ORCA Computing
Vodafone
Vodafone partnered with ORCA Computing to run its network optimisation algorithms on a photonic quantum system, targeting fibre cable design and broadband network planning problems such as the Steiner Tree Problem.
- Outcome
- Joint testing solved a Steiner Tree Problem for optical fibre design in minutes, a task Vodafone says could take hours to years classically. The collaboration is at the letter-of-intent stage; no production deployment has been announced.
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Deloitte Italy: Quantum Machine Learning for Digital Payments Fraud Detection
Deloitte
Deloitte Italy built a digital payments fraud detection solution using a hybrid quantum neural network on AWS, combining classical Keras layers with a 3-qubit PennyLane quantum layer and deploying the pipeline with Amazon Braket and SageMaker.
- Outcome
- On the public Kaggle credit card fraud dataset, the hybrid quantum model reached 0.92 fraud precision versus 0.86 for a comparable classical baseline, using slightly fewer parameters. Experiments ran on simulators; the design is hardware-ready via Braket.
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McKinsey Quantum Technology Monitor: Tracking Industry Quantum Advantage
McKinsey & Company
McKinsey's Quantum Technology practice published a landmark study quantifying $1.3 trillion in annual economic value from quantum computing by 2035, released a Quantum Advantage Tracker monitoring 30+ industry projects, and established a time-to-advantage framework distinguishing near-term NISQ optimization wins from fault-tolerant simulation breakthroughs.
- Outcome
- Report is widely cited in enterprise quantum strategy and board-level investment cases; McKinsey's Monitor tracks record quantum investment, with cumulative announced public funding alone exceeding $30B alongside record private funding.
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NIST and the Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards
NIST / Industry-wide
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology ran an 8-year competition to standardize post-quantum cryptography algorithms, producing FIPS 203, 204, and 205 in 2024 - the first global cryptography standards designed to resist quantum attacks.
- Outcome
- Three standards published in August 2024: ML-KEM (CRYSTALS-Kyber), ML-DSA (CRYSTALS-Dilithium), and SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+); a fourth, FN-DSA (FALCON, planned as FIPS 206), is still awaiting publication. Governments and enterprises worldwide began migration planning.
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European Quantum Flagship: 1 Billion Euro Investment in Quantum Technologies
QuantERA / European Quantum Flagship
The European Quantum Flagship is a 10-year, 1 billion euro initiative coordinating quantum computing, communication, simulation, and sensing research across dozens of national funding agencies and a broad portfolio of projects, building a sovereign European quantum technology ecosystem.
- Outcome
- Flagship funded a broad portfolio of research projects across all four pillars; the European quantum industry has grown rapidly since 2018; IQM brought a 54-qubit superconducting processor to market; the EuroQCI initiative is deploying quantum communication infrastructure across all 27 EU member states.
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BASF: Quantum Chemistry Simulation for Catalyst Design
BASF
BASF is exploring quantum computing for chemical catalyst development as a founding member of the QUTAC consortium and through a 2023 research partnership with SEEQC focused on homogeneous catalysis.
- Outcome
- Early-stage research; BASF estimates roughly 100 high-quality, low-error qubits would be needed even for small-molecule simulation. No quantum advantage demonstrated yet.
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CERN: Quantum Classifiers for LHC Particle Event Selection
CERN
CERN's quantum computing group tested quantum neural networks and parameterized quantum circuits for classifying Large Hadron Collider collision events, comparing quantum classifiers against classical neural networks on Higgs boson signal versus QCD background separation.
- Outcome
- Quantum classifiers with 4-8 qubits matched classical networks with similar parameter counts. No quantum advantage observed on tested benchmarks. The barren plateau problem was identified as a key obstacle to scaling. CERN contributed open quantum ML datasets and benchmarks to the research community.
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Citigroup: QAOA for Portfolio Optimization with Classiq on AWS Braket
Citigroup
Citi Innovation Labs worked with Classiq and AWS to explore the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) for portfolio optimization, studying how the algorithm's penalty factor affects performance using Amazon Braket simulators and quantum processing units.
- Outcome
- Exploratory study. The team investigated how tuning the QAOA penalty factor influences solution quality and whether QAOA could eventually offer advantages over classical methods for portfolio optimization. No specific performance metrics or production deployment have been announced.
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Intel Silicon Spin Qubit: Leveraging Semiconductor Fabrication for Quantum Computing
Intel
Intel's Quantum Research group developed silicon spin qubits fabricated on its 300mm production wafer line, enabling CMOS-compatible qubit manufacturing at semiconductor scale. The Tunnel Falls chip demonstrated 99%+ single-qubit gate fidelity alongside the Horse Ridge II cryogenic control chip.
- Outcome
- Achieved 99%+ single-qubit gate fidelity on silicon spin qubits fabricated on 300mm production line; Horse Ridge II enables control of 128 qubits from a single cryogenic chip.
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Lockheed Martin: Quantum Simulation for Aerospace Materials
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin, one of the earliest commercial quantum computing customers, has pursued quantum simulation of magnetic materials using Heisenberg spin models on trapped ion hardware, with a long-term focus on aerospace materials design.
- Outcome
- D-Wave system acquired in 2011 was used for software verification and optimization tasks. Gate-based research on IonQ trapped ion hardware demonstrated simulation of small Heisenberg spin chain models. Practical quantum advantage for materials simulation is tied to fault-tolerant hardware timelines of a decade or more.
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Microsoft Azure Quantum: Simulating Nitrogen Fixation Catalysts
Microsoft Azure Quantum
Microsoft's Azure Quantum team, in collaboration with academic chemistry partners, applied quantum simulation to the nitrogen fixation problem: understanding how the FeMo-cofactor enzyme catalyzes the conversion of atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia at ambient conditions. The Haber-Bosch industrial process that does this chemically consumes 1-2% of global energy annually; biological nitrogen fixation does the same at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, and understanding its mechanism could enable transformative catalyst design.
- Outcome
- Microsoft published resource estimates showing that a fault-tolerant quantum computer with 4,000 logical qubits running for 96 hours could simulate the FeMo-cofactor active site with chemical accuracy, a computation completely intractable classically. Near-term Q# experiments on IonQ and Quantinuum hardware validated the quantum phase estimation subroutines at small scale, establishing confidence in the algorithmic components needed for the full simulation.
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Quantinuum: Quantum Key Distribution and Certified Randomness for Enterprise Security
Quantinuum
Quantinuum developed Quantum Origin, a commercial quantum randomness service generating certified entropy from trapped-ion hardware for cryptographic key seeding in enterprise security applications.
- Outcome
- Quantum Origin deployed commercially with partners including JPMorgan. Certified quantum randomness integrated into TLS, key management, and certificate pipelines. QKD photon generation demonstrated in research but not yet at commercial scale.
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Quantinuum Compositional Quantum Natural Language Processing
Quantinuum
Quantinuum developed the DisCoCat (Distributional Compositional Categorical) framework for quantum natural language processing, encoding grammatical sentence structure as quantum circuits on their H-series trapped-ion computers. The meaning of a sentence is computed as a tensor contraction of word-state quantum circuits connected by grammatical reduction rules, implemented using the lambeq Python library. Quantinuum ran early binary text classification experiments on small curated sentence datasets using H-series hardware.
- Outcome
- Quantinuum reported 87% classification accuracy on the test sentences in an early lambeq experiment on System Model H1 hardware, the first QNLP problem run on that system; demonstrated that grammar-aware quantum circuits preserve sentence structure that bag-of-words models discard.
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Airbus: Quantum Computing for Computational Fluid Dynamics
Airbus
Airbus explored quantum algorithms for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), specifically targeting the Navier-Stokes equations that model airflow around aircraft wings - one of the most computationally expensive problems in aerospace engineering.
- Outcome
- Identified the HHL linear systems algorithm as a candidate for quantum speedup in CFD, demonstrated small-scale implementations, and concluded that fault-tolerant hardware with millions of qubits is required before practical advantage is achievable.
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BT Group: Quantum Key Distribution Over Live Telecom Fiber
BT Group
BT and Toshiba launched the first commercial trial of quantum-secured communication services, a London metro network running QKD over standard Openreach fiber, with EY as the first commercial customer.
- Outcome
- Trial network went live in April 2022 connecting EY sites at Canary Wharf and near London Bridge over quantum-secured links. The trial demonstrated commercial feasibility of QKD on standard metro fiber; no nationwide production deployment has been announced.
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Mastercard and D-Wave: Quantum Computing for Financial Services
Mastercard
Mastercard formed a multi-year strategic alliance with D-Wave to explore quantum and quantum-hybrid applications in financial services, including consumer loyalty and rewards, cross-border settlement, fraud management, and anti-money laundering.
- Outcome
- Multi-year partnership announced in July 2022. Mastercard gains access to D-Wave's annealing quantum computers and hybrid solvers via the Leap cloud service. No quantitative results or production deployments have been published.
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NASA: Quantum Annealing for Spacecraft Mission Scheduling
NASA / Ames Research Center
NASA's Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) at Ames Research Center applied quantum annealing on D-Wave hardware and QAOA on IBM Quantum to satellite scheduling and mission planning problems, benchmarking against classical constraint programming.
- Outcome
- D-Wave hybrid solver matched classical constraint programming on scheduling instances up to 1000 variables. QAOA at p=2 approached optimal on 20-variable instances. No speed advantage observed over classical solvers for large problems. NASA continues the program as hardware scales.
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Volkswagen and Xanadu: Quantum Algorithms for Battery Materials
Volkswagen
Volkswagen Group and quantum computing company Xanadu run a multiyear research program to develop quantum algorithms for simulating battery materials, aiming at safer, lighter, and more cost-effective battery cells.
- Outcome
- First-phase results were published in Physical Review A: an estimate of the quantum resources needed to simulate the cathode material dilithium iron silicate on a future fault-tolerant quantum computer. The work is algorithm research; no hardware deployment or material discovery has been announced.
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Xanadu: Borealis and Photonic Quantum Advantage
Xanadu
In 2022, Xanadu demonstrated quantum computational advantage using Borealis, a programmable photonic quantum computer. The task - Gaussian boson sampling - was completed in 36 microseconds vs an estimated 9000 years on classical supercomputers.
- Outcome
- First demonstration of quantum advantage on a fully programmable photonic device. Borealis made available via Xanadu Cloud for researchers. Published in Nature, June 2022.
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BMW Group: Quantum Optimization for Test Vehicle Production
BMW Group
BMW Group's Quantum Computing Challenge posed real production planning problems to the quantum community, including optimizing pre-production test vehicle configuration. Researchers tackled it with D-Wave's hybrid constrained quadratic model solver.
- Outcome
- Independent researchers solved BMW's test vehicle use case with D-Wave's hybrid CQM solver and found its performance comparable to classical solvers such as CBC and Gurobi. No quantum advantage was demonstrated; the value was an honest, reproducible benchmark on a real industrial problem.
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Boehringer Ingelheim: Quantum Chemistry Partnership with Google Quantum AI
Boehringer Ingelheim / Google Quantum AI
In January 2021 Boehringer Ingelheim announced a three-year partnership with Google Quantum AI to research quantum computing use cases in pharmaceutical R&D, focusing on molecular dynamics simulations and quantum chemistry. Boehringer was the first pharmaceutical company to partner with Google in quantum computing.
- Outcome
- Exploratory three-year research partnership announced January 2021, co-led by Boehringer Ingelheim's newly established Quantum Lab. It pairs Boehringer's computer-aided drug design expertise with Google's quantum hardware and algorithms. No specific simulation results, hardware benchmarks, or production deployment have been announced.
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ExxonMobil: Quantum Optimisation for Shipping Route Planning
ExxonMobil / IBM Quantum
ExxonMobil partnered with IBM Quantum to apply QAOA and quantum optimisation to maritime shipping route planning, targeting fuel consumption reduction across their global LNG tanker fleet.
- Outcome
- Demonstrated that quantum-classical hybrid QAOA approaches can find solutions competitive with classical solvers for small instances, with a roadmap to practical advantage as error rates improve.
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Goldman Sachs: Quantum Amplitude Estimation for Option Pricing
Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs applied Quantum Amplitude Estimation to European and Asian option pricing, publishing detailed resource analyses showing the qubit counts and error rates required for practical quantum advantage over classical Monte Carlo.
- Outcome
- Confirmed QAE provides quadratic speedup in query complexity over classical Monte Carlo. Resource analysis with IBM found practical advantage would require roughly 8,000 logical qubits running at about a 10 MHz logical clock rate, well beyond current hardware. Identified near-term hybrid approaches as interim strategy.
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JPMorgan: Quantum Portfolio Optimization with QAOA
JPMorgan Chase
JPMorgan's quantum computing research team applied the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) to portfolio selection problems, benchmarking it against classical methods on current NISQ hardware.
- Outcome
- QAOA matched classical solution quality on small instances (up to 60 assets). Identified that quantum advantage in finance requires error-corrected hardware. Published multiple peer-reviewed papers establishing methodology for finance use cases.
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Toshiba Research: Quantum Key Distribution Over 600km Fiber
Toshiba Research
Toshiba's UK research lab demonstrated twin-field QKD over 600km of standard fiber optic cable, setting a distance record and achieving key rates sufficient for AES-256 key refresh in real financial networks.
- Outcome
- Achieved 600km QKD over standard optical fiber, far beyond the 100-200km range of commercial QKD systems at the time. Key rates were sufficient for real network use with AES-256 key refresh. Toshiba is commercializing QKD systems and has worked with partners including BT on quantum-secure network trials.
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Toyota and QunaSys: Quantum Computing for EV Battery Materials
Toyota Motor
Toyota partnered with Japanese quantum software startup QunaSys to research new EV battery materials, exploring how quantum computers can improve the accuracy and speed of electronic structure simulation.
- Outcome
- Joint research announced in October 2021, with the partners considering use of Japan's first commercial IBM quantum computer in Kawasaki. The work is exploratory materials research; no material discoveries or production results have been announced.
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Airbus: Quantum Optimization for Satellite Constellation Scheduling
Airbus
Airbus Defence and Space formulated satellite imaging scheduling as a QUBO problem and benchmarked D-Wave quantum annealing and QAOA against classical constraint programming for constellation management.
- Outcome
- Quantum annealing solved Earth-observation scheduling instances faster than exact solvers in some cases, matching heuristic solution quality on small instances. Full constellation management still benefits from quantum only as a subproblem solver.
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IBM and Daimler: Quantum Chemistry for Battery Materials
IBM Quantum / Daimler
IBM and Daimler AG (now Mercedes-Benz) collaborated to simulate the lithium hydride molecule using VQE on IBM quantum hardware, exploring quantum chemistry for next-generation battery design.
- Outcome
- Successfully simulated LiH molecular energy using VQE on real hardware. Demonstrated that noisy quantum hardware + error mitigation can produce chemically meaningful results at small scale.
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Barclays: Quantum Algorithms for Securities Settlement Optimization
Barclays
Barclays' chief technology and innovation office worked with IBM to develop and test a proof-of-concept quantum algorithm for optimizing securities transaction settlement, running core parts of the problem on a seven-qubit IBM cloud quantum computer.
- Outcome
- Proof of concept demonstrated on a seven-qubit IBM device. The team showed that settlement features of sufficient complexity could be expressed and explored with quantum methods, but stated that any practical advantage would only appear at large scale (tens of thousands of trades). No production deployment has been announced.
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Google: Demonstrating Quantum Computational Advantage
Google Quantum AI
Google's Quantum AI team demonstrated that their Sycamore processor completed a specific computation in 200 seconds that they estimated would take a classical supercomputer 10,000 years. In 2024 their Willow chip cut the error rate below a key threshold.
- Outcome
- First credible demonstration of quantum computational advantage (2019). Willow (2024) achieved below-threshold error correction, a 30-year milestone in the field.
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Volkswagen: Quantum Traffic Optimization in Lisbon
Volkswagen Group
Volkswagen ran a quantum routing pilot at the 2019 Web Summit in Lisbon, using a D-Wave quantum computer to calculate real-time routes for nine public buses operated by CARRIS.
- Outcome
- Pilot ran live during Web Summit 2019 with nine CARRIS buses on four routes. D-Wave described it as among the first production uses of a quantum computer. It remained a pilot; no permanent deployment has been announced.