Despite comprising over 300 vendors the QC market is at a nascent stage of market development. The reality is that essentially all vendor revenue to date comes from customers who are experimenting with QC technology – not using it for operational purposes. However, Omdia believes that 2025 will mark an important shift upwards in the trajectory of QC vendor revenue growth, partially because of a shift from experimentation to operation.
Reaching “quantum advantage” will be an on-going, years-long process and large-scale (i.e., thousands of logical qubits), fully fault tolerant QCs likely won’t be available before the middle of the next decade. Nevertheless, well before that stage of technology development is reached, a growing number of adopters in a growing number of applications and use cases will see a tangible economic benefit from QC or even become able to perform computations that are intractable for classical computers.
Sam Lucero, Chief Analyst for Quantum Computing at Omdia, said “As this process unfolds, we’ll gain more clarity on which qubit modalities are best suited to scale up and leverage quantum error correction (QEC). And perhaps, eventually, we’ll find that entirely new qubit modalities will be invented.”
However, as a cautionary note, the current 300-strong vendor landscape will undoubtedly consolidate over time; this process has already begun, and 2025 will likely see an acceleration of this trend.
Omdia recently published its 2025 Trends to Watch in Quantum Computing report, which assesses four key trends that will become prominent over the course of 2025:
- The start of a shift from experiments to production: Currently, nearly all use of QC technology is for experimentation – that is, to learn about QC technology. Starting in 2025, however, an increasing number of adopters will use QC technology for operational or production purposes.
- Neutral atom qubit innovation will accelerate: Several neutral atom qubit-based vendors achieved impressive technological milestones in 2024, engendering key strategic partnerships with key technology giants. Expect the pace of innovation with the neutral atom qubit modality to speed up in 2025.
- Additional app stores will appear in the market: IBM launched a QC “app store” in September 2024. While only six Functions exist in the Catalog at launch, the app store model will enable faster innovation cycles and more turnkey adoption. It will likely be copied by other vendors in 2025.
- Increasing vendor consolidation in the market: While investment in QC vendors resumed growth in 2024, the formation of new QC startups did not. The inevitable process of vendor consolidation in the 300-vendor strong QC market has begun.
