In December 2024, Google announced that its new quantum chip, called Willow, completed a computation in under five minutes that would take the most powerful classical supercomputer around 10 septillion years. That is a number with 25 digits. The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, which has 10 digits.
Those numbers sound absurd, and honestly they kind of are. But the result is real, it was published in Nature, and it matters — just not in the way most headlines suggest.
Willow is a 105-qubit quantum processor. Qubits are the quantum equivalent of the bits in your computer, except they can exist in multiple states at once (a property called superposition) and can be connected to each other in ways that classical bits cannot (called entanglement).
The big deal with Willow is not just speed. It is error correction. Quantum computers have a noise problem — qubits are extremely fragile and prone to errors. Previous quantum chips got worse as you added more qubits, because more qubits meant more errors. Willow is the first chip where adding more qubits actually reduced the error rate. Google's team called this going "below threshold," and it is something physicists have been working toward for almost 30 years.
The specific computation Willow performed is called random circuit sampling. It is essentially a benchmark designed to be easy for quantum computers and hard for classical ones. It does not have a direct practical application. It is more like a proof that the hardware is working the way quantum theory says it should.
Your passwords are fine. For now.
The most common fear about quantum computing is that it will break encryption. The math checks out — a large enough quantum computer running Shor's algorithm could factor the large numbers that RSA encryption depends on. But "large enough" means millions of error-corrected qubits. Willow has 105. We are orders of magnitude away from the kind of quantum computer that could threaten current encryption.
IBM's quantum roadmap estimates we will need machines with around 100,000 qubits to do useful error-corrected computations, and that is still years away from being able to break encryption.
It also does not mean quantum computers are about to replace regular computers. They are fundamentally different tools. A quantum computer will not run your web browser faster or make your Excel spreadsheets open quicker. They are good at specific kinds of problems: simulating molecules, optimizing complex systems, and certain types of cryptography. For everything else, classical computers are still better.
Even though the encryption threat is years away, the preparation is happening now. In 2024, NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) published its first set of post-quantum cryptography standards — new encryption methods designed to be secure against both classical and quantum computers.
This matters because of something called "harvest now, decrypt later." Attackers are already collecting encrypted data today with the plan to decrypt it once quantum computers are powerful enough. If someone intercepts your medical records, financial data, or government communications today and stores them, a quantum computer in 2040 could potentially read all of it.
That is why governments and large companies are already transitioning to post-quantum encryption. Apple added post-quantum encryption to iMessage in early 2024. Signal, the messaging app, did the same. The transition will take years, and most regular websites and services have not started yet.
I have read a lot of predictions on this and the consensus among researchers (not marketers) is roughly:
That said, predictions in this field have been wrong before in both directions. The only safe bet is that the technology is progressing faster than most people expected five years ago.
Quantum threats are years away, but everyday scams are here now. Use our free tools to stay safe.