In March 2026, Google's quantum chip ran a computation that would take a classical computer an estimated 10 septillion years. That sounds like a news story about the future. It is actually an emergency memo about the present. QNu Labs CMO Sudiptaa Paul Choudhury lays out the timeline in a guest post this week: the threat is not that quantum computers can break your encryption today. The threat is that adversaries are harvesting your encrypted data right now, storing it, and waiting for quantum machines to catch up. By the time the key exists, the lock is already irrelevant.
What Quantum Computers Actually Are Right Now
A qubit, the basic unit of a quantum computer, is a physical system that can exist in multiple states simultaneously until you measure it, at which point it collapses to a single answer. Classical computers use bits that are always either zero or one. The reason this matters for encryption is that most modern encryption relies on a mathematical problem, factoring very large numbers, that takes classical computers so long it is practically impossible. A quantum computer with enough stable qubits could solve that problem quickly. Current machines have qubits but they are fragile: a stray vibration, a temperature fluctuation, any interference from the environment can corrupt the computation. This is the error problem the field is racing to solve. Quobly and Absolut System's new industrial partnership is specifically about the cryogenic infrastructure needed to keep qubits cold enough to behave. The useful version is probably 5 to 15 years away. The harvesting of data to decrypt later is happening now.
Why Enterprises Are Not Moving Fast Enough
The cybersecurity industry has a well-documented present-bias problem: companies invest in threats that have already materialized, not threats that are structurally guaranteed but temporally uncertain. The DOJ's second request on Fox's $22 billion Roku acquisition is a proxy for how long regulatory processes take. Post-quantum migration is a similar timescale mismatch: the governance apparatus moves at deal-review speed while the technical threat moves at physics speed. NIST finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024. Most enterprise security stacks have not implemented them. The gap between standard and practice is where the harvest is happening.