The Commercialisation Gap

Here is the fact that should anchor every quantum investment decision: after decades of research and record funding, no quantum computer has yet solved a real problem of any economic value.^[1] Reviewing the field in late 2025, the physicists who defined this era, including the coiner of the term “NISQ”, concluded that today’s machines, while able to perform operations beyond a supercomputer’s reach, have not produced an outcome that carries practical or economic value.^[1]

The engineering gap explains why. A quantum computer able to run genuinely useful simulations might need on the order of a million physical qubits at today’s error rates; the largest chips today hold a few hundred.^[1] That is the distance between a demonstration and a product.

Mind the fork in the forecasts

The industry’s own forecasts quietly admit it. McKinsey projects $1–2.7 trillion of economic value by 2035 and calls this a “tipping point”; the more sober BCG sees $450–850 billion by 2040 but a hardware-and-software market of only $1–2 billion by 2030, conceding quantum “has yet to experience its ChatGPT moment.”^[2][3] The vast 2035–40 headlines and the tiny near-term revenue lines are the same story told two ways: and the space between them is the commercialisation gap. Even the sceptics move markets: when Nvidia’s CEO mused in early 2025 that useful quantum machines might be 15–30 years away, quantum pure-plays fell about 40% in a day; he softened the tone weeks later, but not the timeline.^[4]

The demos measure septillions of years. The revenue measures a rounding error. That gap is the whole investment question.

The distance between a demonstration and a product is not a matter of a few more qubits; it is orders of magnitude, and the industry’s own bifurcated forecasts quietly concede it. A million physical qubits against a few hundred today is not a roadmap detail, it is the whole engineering problem, and it is why the enormous 2035–2040 value estimates and the tiny near-term revenue lines describe the same reality from opposite ends. For a disciplined allocator the lesson is not to avoid the field but to price it honestly: a long-duration, high-variance research bet, best expressed through the layers, components, sensing, communications, where something actually ships in the meantime.

Why it matters — and where China fits

For a disciplined investor, the near-term value in quantum is not in computing but in its neighbours: communications and sensing, where things actually ship. That happens to favour China, whose most deployed quantum assets are its network and its component supply chain, not a revenue-generating computer.^[5] We treat quantum computing as a long-horizon, high-variance research bet to underwrite selectively, through the enabling hardware and the nearer-term sensing and communications layers, and we discount trillion-dollar 2035 forecasts to what they are: scenarios, not base cases.