The UN has declared 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology – the moment when the quantum story moved from spectacle to substance. Editors and investors have grown less interested in raw qubit tallies and more interested in where quantum delivers measurable value in energy, materials, logistics and finance. That pivot is now explicit in Brussels’ “Quantum Europe Strategy”, which aims to make the EU a global leader by 2030 and to turn breakthrough science into market-ready tools, not just lab prototypes. The year also brought a timely reminder of why this field matters: the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics went to pioneers of superconducting quantum circuits – work that underpins much of today’s programmable hardware.
The global balance is multipolar. China, Japan and the largest EU economies dominate on public budgets and the breadth of ecosystems; the United States and the United Kingdom lean on a blend of research universities, well-capitalised vendors and mission-driven public demand. The EU is attempting to align research and industrialisation in a single roadmap and, crucially, to crowd in private money after years of public outlay. Its July 2025 package stresses resilient supply chains, procurement to create first markets and an end-to-end European stack. On the other side of the Atlantic, policy is now part of the stack: Washington’s September 2024 export-control rule carved out new, “plurilateral” licensing for quantum items and related services, forcing ecosystems to localise control electronics, cryogenics, packaging and parts of the software toolchain. London’s answer has been long-horizon programme funding – the UK National Quantum Strategy commits £2.5 billion over a decade and sets missions to pull prototypes towards deployment.
Hardware expectations have been tempered by credible yardsticks rather than marketing claims. A reference many readers will recognise is Quantinuum’s 96-qubit trapped-ion Helios system, presented in November 2025 it is not a magical threshold for usefulness, but it has become a practical benchmark for discussing scale and operational quality across trapped-ion platforms, and it reminds us that error rates, connectivity and reliable circuit depth now matter more than headline qubits. Market analysis echoes the shift: McKinsey’s 2025 Quantum Technology Monitor describes a turn from “growing qubits” to stabilising them and prioritising applications where value can be measured.
Against that backdrop, Russia’s trajectory is pragmatic. In eight-year investment tables it sits just outside the top tier largely because its national push began only in 2020, so those tallies compare roughly five years of spend with eight for earlier movers. That windowing effect can mislead. The more telling question is conversion: how reliably funding turns into pilots, software and users. On that metric the Rosatom-coordinated national programme has made significant progress over the past two years: a domestic cloud platform is being developed to provide access to newly built quantum computers, and the portfolio of quantum algorithms is expanding, covering optimisation and simulation tasks across chemistry, medicine, logistics and data processing. Public reporting and media statements through mid-2025 note the creation of two 50-qubit processors: one based on trapped ions and the other on neutral atoms, built under the national quantum computing roadmap.
Russia’s hardware bet is diversification. Work proceeds in parallel on trapped ions and neutral atoms, with superconducting and photonic prototypes also in view. As part of the roadmap “Quantum Computing” roadmap, quantum processors have been created on four leading technological platforms: a 50-qubit processor based on trapped ions, a 50-qubit processor based on neutral atoms, a 35-qubit processor based on photonic chips, and a 16-qubit superconducting device. Set against the external trapped-ion yardstick, this is a comparable demonstration scale, though the more important test is whether quality – fidelity, connectivity and executable circuit depth – improves in step. A second front is opening in industrial use. Companies abroad and in Russia are converging on a shortlist of problems for early quantum and quantum-inspired trials. Rosatom’s internal “Task Bank and Practical Quantum Computing Use Cases” points to twelve industries, more than hundreds problem types and use cases across thirty-plus countries.
In pharmaceuticals, Russian researchers report a quantum model trained on libraries of biologically active compounds that suggested more than four thousand potentially synthesizable drug-like molecules. In aerospace, major manufacturers are pairing quantum algorithms with high-performance computing to tackle aerodynamics workloads and design optimisation; Airbus has outlined work on trajectory optimisation and CFD-related tasks with partners, Rolls-Royce frames quantum as a path to scale computational-fluid-dynamics far beyond today’s limits, and BMW describes multi-year trials across design and manufacturing – evidence that the most structured problems are likely to yield the earliest returns.
The new phase of led by Rosatom quantum project, launched in 2025, is focused on the practical application of quantum computing in various industrial sectors, and primarily in the nuclear industry, where a large-scale implementation program was already launched in 2024. The portfolio for 2025-2026 includes 30 pilot projects for the practical application of quantum computing in areas such as: optimizing the production, storage, and supply of products to consumers; optimizing production order schedules considering the technological route; optimization in digital twins of production facilities using simulation modeling with a quantum-inspired optimizer; simulation of physical processes in reactor core components; and others. Initial tests confirm the potential advantages of quantum computers on these model tasks, with the expectation that rising “quality qubits” will allow problems to grow as hardware matures. The significance of this step was signposted at the St Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2025 and reinforced in programme notes later in the year.
Let’s look at other countries that oversee and roll out national-scale quantum programmes. China’s anchors are the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Science and Technology of China: they operate the long-haul Beijing–Shanghai quantum-secure backbone, integrated with the Micius satellite, and have repeatedly demonstrated national-class machines – superconducting Zuchongzhi for programmable advantage and the photonic Jiuzhang platform, reported in its “4.0” version in 2025. Japan’s operator ecosystem is increasingly domestically rooted: RIKEN and Fujitsu have unveiled a 256-qubit home-grown superconducting system slated for global access in FY2025, and in July 2025 Osaka University’s QIQB switched on Japan’s first fully home-built superconducting computer with a Japanese QPU and software toolchain; this push is backed by record public funding, including an extra ¥1.05 trillion (≈ $7.0 billion) for next-gen chips and quantum, and ¥50 billion (≈ $0.33 billion)targeted at quantum start-ups. South Korea couples a state strategy aiming to be a “global hub for the quantum economy” by the mid-2030s – with operator-level delivery: SK Broadband and ID Quantique have built a nationwide quantum-safe key-distribution network linking forty-eight government departments over an 800-km backbone, while SK Telecom has piloted post-quantum cryptography on 5G with Thales. India and Canada underscore the breadth of the contest: New Delhi’s National Quantum Mission runs to 2030–31 with ₹6,003.65 crore (≈ ₹60 billion ≈ $0.72 billion) budgeted, while Ottawa’s National Quantum Strategy allocates C$360 million (≈ $270 million) to guide hardware, software and talent.
Note: USD figures are approximate for readability (¥1 ≈ $0.0067; ₹1 ≈ $0.012; C$1 ≈ $0.75).
How, then, should readers compare countries without being trapped by league tables? China and the EU still dominate on public budgets and the breadth of their ecosystems. The US and the UK maintain pace through a mix of research universities, well-capitalised vendors and finance or pharma use cases, with London’s £2.5 billion plan designed to pull ideas through to deployment. Russia, entering later, is trying to compensate with speed in niches that have physical economics and hard KPIs. If Russia keeps to its stated 2025-2030 course- scaling ion- and atom-based systems towards hundreds of more reliable qubits, launching a national push into quantum sensors from 2026 with pilot deployments targeted for 2029, and broadening the pipeline of industrial trials – then headlines will increasingly be about operational impact in sectors where failures are not acceptable – energy, transport and healthcare among others – rather than “beautiful” qubit counts.
Two conclusions stand out. First, time-to-value beats raw scale: winners will be those who can translate algorithms into robust production pipelines across more than one hardware “diet”. Second, geopolitics is not a distraction but an accelerant of localisation and platform diversity; in an era of export controls and supply-chain caution, ecosystems that can mix ions, atoms, photonics and superconductors – and switch between them as vendors wax and wane—will prove more resilient. Europe has put that logic in writing; Russia’s programme, by necessity as much as by design, is behaving as if the same logic applies.