Enterprise investment in quantum computing is rising before the technology has reached broad commercial maturity. The significance is not that useful quantum computing has suddenly arrived, but that large companies are beginning to treat quantum readiness and commercial adoption as questions of enterprise strategy rather than long-term research.

There has always been substantial money in quantum computing. Much of it, however, has traditionally come from governments, universities, research laboratories and the technology companies attempting to build the machines themselves. What appears to be changing is the role of the enterprise.

Boston Consulting Group estimates that spending on quantum computing reached around $550 million in 2025, with enterprise end users accounting for more than half of the market for the first time. BCG describes this as a significant change from the pattern normally seen with early-stage technologies, where academic and government research funding tends to dominate. (BCG Global)

The Wall Street Journal puts enterprise spending at approximately $300 million during 2025 and reports that companies including HSBC, Allstate and EY are already investing in quantum capabilities, people and potential applications. (The Wall Street Journal)

Those numbers need some perspective. They refer to the quantum-computing market being measured by BCG; they should not be interpreted as meaning that corporate expenditure now exceeds the entirety of government quantum investment programmes around the world. Nevertheless, the direction of travel is difficult to ignore. Quantum computing is starting to attract budgets from organisations that expect eventually to use the technology rather than simply develop it.

Spending before certainty

This is happening despite one stubborn fact: nobody can yet say with certainty when fault-tolerant quantum computers will begin creating significant commercial value at scale.

BCG believes the commercial inflection point could arrive by 2030, but it also identifies an important gap between rapidly improving hardware and the availability of algorithms capable of solving valuable real-world problems. Powerful machines could arrive before businesses have worked out exactly what to do with them. (BCG Global)

Enterprise behaviour therefore becomes particularly interesting.

More than 60% of the enterprises surveyed by BCG are now spending more than $1 million annually on quantum computing. The nature of that investment is also changing. Between 2022 and 2024, the proportion of enterprise quantum budgets devoted to algorithm and software development increased from 21% to 40%. Companies are moving beyond simply obtaining access to experimental hardware and are beginning to investigate how quantum computing might eventually interact with actual business problems. (BCG Global)

That is a considerably more important indicator of maturity than another announcement about qubit counts. It suggests that some large organisations have stopped asking only when will quantum computing be ready? and have started asking a different question: will we be ready when it is?

Quantum readiness has two sides

For enterprises, that preparation is developing along two parallel tracks.

The first is offensive. Organisations are exploring where quantum computing could eventually create competitive advantage in areas such as optimisation, financial modelling, materials science, pharmaceuticals, logistics and complex risk analysis. BCG reports that proof-of-concept activity has increased substantially, with around 100 enterprises involved in approximately 150 quantum projects by the end of 2024. Examples include work involving HSBC and IBM in bond trading, AstraZeneca and partners in molecular simulation, and Airbus, BMW and Quantinuum in fuel-cell modelling. (BCG Global)

The second is defensive, and its timetable is rather less optional.

Current public-key cryptography will eventually need to be replaced or supplemented with quantum-resistant alternatives. For organisations with complex infrastructures, long-lived products or sensitive data that must remain protected for many years, post-quantum cryptography is therefore a migration problem that exists independently of the debate over exactly when commercially useful quantum computers arrive.

HSBC provides an interesting example of both approaches. The bank has explored quantum applications for bond trading while simultaneously increasing work on quantum-resilient cybersecurity. Its concern is straightforward: the cryptographic transition must be completed before a cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists, not afterwards. (The Wall Street Journal)

This makes quantum readiness different from simply betting on a future technology because a company can reasonably decide that it does not yet need to develop a quantum optimisation application. It cannot necessarily make the same decision about understanding which cryptographic systems, data and products could eventually be exposed.

The lesson companies took from AI

There is another factor influencing this early spending. Some corporate leaders are looking at the rapid arrival of generative AI and concluding that preparation should begin before a technology reaches its obvious commercial tipping point. The Wall Street Journal reports that concern about having been insufficiently prepared for the AI boom is helping drive current quantum investment, particularly around talent, infrastructure and understanding potential applications. (The Wall Street Journal)

The analogy is useful, but it should not be taken too far. Generative AI rapidly became applicable across an extraordinary range of corporate activities. Quantum computing is far more specialised and is likely to produce disproportionate value in particular classes of computational problem. There may never be a quantum equivalent of employees throughout an organisation opening ChatGPT on Monday morning and discovering that their working lives have changed by lunchtime.

The strategic lesson, however, survives the comparison. Capability takes time to build. Specialist knowledge cannot be recruited overnight. Useful problems need to be identified and translated into computational models. Relationships with technology providers have to be developed. Data and infrastructure need to be understood. Intellectual property may need to be created. On the defensive side, cryptographic estates must be discovered before they can be migrated.

Waiting for certainty can therefore become a strategy in itself — and not necessarily a particularly good one.

From quantum investment to quantum preparedness

The next phase of enterprise quantum adoption should consequently be judged less by how much money companies spend and more by what capability that spending creates.

Owning quantum hardware is not the objective for most organisations. Running a proof of concept is not evidence of transformation either. The more meaningful questions concern whether a company understands where quantum could affect its business, whether it has identified problems worth solving, whether it has access to the necessary expertise and whether its security architecture is capable of migrating towards post-quantum protection.

BCG warns of a potential gap between quantum capability and quantum value: increasingly powerful machines without enough practical applications ready to exploit them. Closing that gap will require enterprises themselves to participate in defining use cases rather than leaving the development of quantum entirely to hardware companies and researchers. (BCG Global)

That may prove to be the real significance of the latest spending figures. They do not tell us that the quantum era has arrived. They do tell us that some of the world’s largest businesses have decided they would rather begin preparing too early than discover, once again, that they started too late.