The Wrong Yardstick
Quantum's biggest economic impact may arrive outside the quantum computer.
A camera normally produces an image. The photons hit a detector, become electrons, and eventually turn into pixels arranged for human eyes.
But a machine does not always need the picture. Sometimes it only needs the answer.
Is that a ship? Is that a patch of missing forest canopy? Is that object on a collision course with my satellite?
On a recent episode of the podcast, Johannes Galatsanos of Diffraqtion described a camera designed to process light in the photonic domain without converting it into electronic information. It uses quantum information theory to ask how much information can be extracted from incoming photons, then performs inference optically. No JPEG is required. No round trip through a power-hungry GPU is required before the machine can decide what it is looking at.
The company is developing a version for a 6U CubeSat—a satellite small enough to fit in a backpack—with a 10-centimeter aperture. For particular classification tasks, Galatsanos says, it could compete with observation systems the size of a school bus.
The device does not depend on entanglement or superposition. It sits in a gray area between quantum sensing, quantum-inspired technology, photonics, and analog computing. And that is precisely why I think it matters.
If our definition of the quantum industry includes only quantum computers, quantum networks, and quantum cryptography, we miss technologies like this. More importantly, we miss the economic story that may ultimately justify the scale of public investment now flowing into regional quantum initiatives.
We are using the wrong yardstick.
The skeptical case is mostly right
Illinois and Colorado were early and visible in treating quantum as a regional economic-development strategy. Other states are now moving in the same direction. Connecticut has committed public funding to research infrastructure, workforce development, and commercialization. Texas has connected quantum-enhanced metrology directly to its semiconductor strategy. The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park and Colorado's Elevate Quantum Tech Hub put fabrication, prototyping, and workforce development alongside computing.
Those are large ambitions. They deserve a rigorous test.
If you evaluate them solely by the likely market for vertically integrated quantum computers, skepticism is reasonable. Neutral-atom and trapped-ion systems and other modaliites are likely to deliver increasingly capable logical qubits over the next five years. That would be a profound technical achievement. It would not, by itself, create demand for billions of devices.
Even a useful fault-tolerant quantum computer will complement classical computing, not replace it. The most credible applications remain concentrated in problems with native quantum structure: simulating materials, molecules, and chemical reactions; running algorithms with proven mathematical advantages, Shor's algorithm being the canonical example; and, perhaps at much larger scales, attacking certain classes of optimization.
The indirect claims are harder, such as the often repeated idea that quantum computing can save us from the unfolding climate crises. The climate is not a quantum system. A quantum computer may contribute to climate work by helping discover a better catalyst, battery chemistry, photovoltaic material, or method of transmitting energy. That could be enormously valuable, but it is several steps removed from the machine itself.
So the skeptic can make a coherent argument: perhaps the world will need tens or hundreds of especially capable quantum computers before it needs thousands. How can a market of that size support the public investment, fabrication capacity, and workforce programs now being proposed?
My answer is that the skeptic is measuring the machines when the real opportunity is the industrial capability built around them.
Broaden the aperture
When I interviewed Dana Anderson of Infleqtion, he offered a line that continues to echo in my mind. To paraphrase: "in the future, If a company is not operating at a quantum limit, it will not be competitive."
I take that in the broadest possible sense.
It applies not only to a company building a quantum computer, but potentially to a company making aircraft components, medical instruments, automobiles, batteries, or semiconductors. One manufacturer may use quantum-derived simulations to select a material, quantum sensing to find microscopic defects, and fabrication techniques capable of controlling matter at atomic scales. Its competitor may not. Over time, that difference becomes a difference in cost, quality, energy efficiency, and performance.
Seen this way, quantum is not simply a new category of computers. It is part of the next generation of advanced manufacturing.
The opportunity extends in both directions.
Upstream are the companies that make the enabling equipment and components: lasers, photonic circuits, vacuum systems, filters, connectors, dilution refrigerators, control electronics, cryogenic electronics, precision timing systems, and new materials. Many of these products will serve more than the quantum market. A better laser, lower-noise amplifier, more precise control system, or more reliable cryogenic component can migrate into aerospace, medical imaging, defense, telecommunications, and scientific instrumentation.
Downstream are the techniques and products made possible by quantum R&D: new forms of sensing, imaging, navigation, metrology, materials discovery, and low-power information processing. Diffraqtion's camera is a vivid example. Its value does not depend on a universal quantum computer arriving first. The scientific lineage is quantum information; the engineering is photonic; the prospective product is a smaller, faster, more energy-efficient machine-vision system.
This is how new industrial capabilities spread. The breakthrough device gets the attention. The tools, suppliers, skills, and adjacent applications create the larger economy.
The semiconductor industry is already operating at the quantum limit
The connection becomes clearest in semiconductors.
For decades, the industry improved computers by shrinking transistors and packing more of them onto a chip. That simple description now conceals extraordinary complexity. Progress depends on new transistor architectures, new materials, atomic-scale deposition and etching, more sophisticated metrology, advanced packaging, and lithography machines so complex that no single company—or country—can reproduce the entire supply chain alone.
The nomenclature can be misleading. A "2 nm" process is a generation of manufacturing technology, not a claim that every transistor feature measures exactly two nanometers. But the underlying engineering really is approaching atomic dimensions, where tunneling, confinement, noise, and other quantum effects are not edge cases. They are design constraints.
TSMC moved its N2 nanosheet process into volume production in late 2025. IBM has since unveiled technology for a sub-1-nanometer node, while carefully noting that the node name describes a technology generation. At these scales, the future of classical computing increasingly depends on the ability to model, measure, and manipulate matter using quantum mechanics.
Consider the manufacturing infrastructure required to get here. ASML says conventional extreme-ultraviolet lithography took more than two decades to develop and required more than €6 billion in company R&D over 17 years. Its next-generation High-NA EUV platform drew on another decade of development. The lesson is not simply that advanced machines are expensive. It is that a strategically important manufacturing capability emerges from a sustained ecosystem: basic science, patient capital, public investment, specialized suppliers, shared facilities, and a workforce that accumulates hard-to-reproduce knowledge.
Quantum technologies are building many of the same muscles from the other direction.
The semiconductor industry began with comparatively crude, top-down patterning and spent decades driving toward atomic precision. Quantum engineers begin with individual atoms, ions, photons, defects in crystals, and superconducting circuits, then face the opposite problem: how to control them reliably and manufacture them at scale.
Those paths are converging.
Quantum computing may never require semiconductor-like volumes to have an enormous impact on semiconductor manufacturing. The valuable contribution may come from quantum-enhanced metrology, quantum-derived materials, cryogenic electronics, photonic integration, new fabrication processes, and a generation of engineers trained to design from the atomic scale up.
That is a much larger industrial proposition than the number of quantum computers sold.
A better test for regional quantum initiatives
This changes how I evaluate a state or regional quantum strategy.
Landing a famous hardware company is not enough. Neither is installing a machine, announcing a science park, or counting qubits located inside state lines. Those may be useful milestones, but they do not tell us whether the investment will compound.
The better questions are whether the initiative creates shared fabrication and prototyping capacity; whether it gives startups and researchers access to tools they could not afford alone; whether it develops technicians and manufacturing workers alongside physicists and PhDs; whether it attracts suppliers; and whether its capabilities can serve adjacent industries already present in the region.
In other words: is this building a durable advanced-manufacturing ecosystem, or is it a procurement program with a science-park logo?
There is a real risk here. Downstream applications may take longer to materialize than policymakers expect. Shared facilities can become expensive monuments if companies cannot use them easily. Workforce programs can train people for jobs that have not arrived. And the quantum label can be stretched so broadly that it stops imposing any discipline at all.
That risk is an argument for better yardsticks, not smaller ambition.
We should measure supplier formation, time from laboratory result to manufactured prototype, facility utilization, private capital unlocked, technicians trained, adjacent-industry adoption, and the number of products that escape the quantum category entirely because customers simply regard them as better cameras, better sensors, better materials, or better chips.
The quantum computer will remain the emblem of the field. It is the machine that most clearly announces a new model of information itself. But it may not be the largest source of jobs, factories, or economic spillovers.
The larger opportunity is to build the disciplines, tools, suppliers, and talent required to manufacture at the quantum limit—and then let those capabilities spread across the rest of the economy.
If that is what Illinois, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, and the regions following them are trying to build, the investment case does not depend on selling a billion quantum computers.
It depends on something both less spectacular and more consequential: making nearly everything else better.
