Quantum computing has crossed from scientific curiosity to strategic asset, and the seemingly unrelated stories—executive orders, national security commissions, and companies planting manufacturing hubs in Barcelona or Palo Alto—are really one story: law and capital following credible, peer-reviewed hardware progress. The most non-obvious insight is that raw qubit counts are nearly meaningless without error rates and connectivity, and the field's most promising near-term payoff isn't code-breaking but quantum simulation of molecules and materials, where the machine speaks nature's native language.

Topics: quantum computing, qubit quality, simulation, geopolitics, national security