Trump orders national push for quantum computer by 2028

Donald Trump ordered a national push to build a quantum computer powerful enough to begin quantum-enabled scientific discovery, even though no quantum machine has yet conclusively performed a single useful task. The June 22 executive order is meant to “supercharge” U.S. quantum innovation and speed commercial applications, a promise that lands against a hard technical reality: today’s systems are still too small and too error-ridden to solve commercially relevant problems.

The order directs the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology to update the National Quantum Strategy and coordinate with the Energy, Commerce, War and Intelligence Community portfolios. It also calls for plans to deploy quantum-enabled sensors and networks within five years. Michael Kratsios, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director: “We believe this can happen by 2028.” The administration has already put $2 billion into the field, money that is likely to keep flowing to laboratories, hardware makers and defense programs.

Key government systems are set to migrate to post-quantum cryptography by 2030 or 2031, while the Pentagon has been told to deploy quantum sensors by 2028. Those sensors could help aircraft navigate when GPS is disrupted and could aid satellite-based searches for underground tunnels or missile silos.

The field is becoming tangible and commercially promising, but the timing of real impact is still unclear. The MIT Sloan 2025 Quantum Index Report counted two dozen manufacturers commercially offering more than 40 quantum processing units. Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google are still leaning hard on error correction, the bottleneck that stands between today’s noisy devices and fault-tolerant machines, and big tech road maps still point to about 2030 for that milestone.

A Nature critique raised fresh questions about Microsoft’s claimed breakthrough from the prior year. Microsoft expects a working quantum system by 2029, after nearly two decades spent on Majorana-related research. The qubits themselves remain fragile, able to lose their state within fractions of a second.