Where Quantum Delivers
Real Advantage

Simulating Molecular Behaviour

Developing a new drug traditionally takes 10 to 15 years and costs over $2 billion on average, with a failure rate of more than 90% in clinical trials. A large part of this cost comes from the need to model how drug molecules interact with proteins at the atomic level, a calculation that grows exponentially harder as the molecule gets larger.

Classical computers can only approximate these simulations. A quantum computer, because it fundamentally operates using quantum mechanical rules, can simulate quantum systems directly and exactly. A system of 50 electrons, which is far beyond any classical simulation, could be handled precisely by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running the right algorithm.

Pharmaceutical companies including Roche, Bayer, and Biogen are already partnering with quantum computing companies to explore this capability. IBM has demonstrated quantum simulations of simple molecules, and Google's quantum team has published work on simulating chemical reactions that would be intractable for classical machines.

Problems Too Large for Classical Computers

Many of the most costly and important problems in business and logistics are optimisation problems: finding the best possible solution among an astronomically large number of possibilities. The travelling salesman problem asks for the shortest route visiting a list of cities. Easy to describe, it becomes computationally impossible to solve exactly using classical computers once the number of cities grows beyond a few hundred.

Airlines need to optimise flight schedules, crew assignments, and gate allocations simultaneously across thousands of flights. Shipping companies route hundreds of thousands of packages through global networks. Financial institutions optimise portfolios across thousands of assets under complex constraints. All of these are optimisation problems that scale in ways that rapidly overwhelm classical computing capacity.

Volkswagen partnered with D-Wave to optimise traffic flow for 10,000 taxis in Beijing, achieving results faster than classical methods. Airbus has used quantum algorithms to optimise aircraft loading. DHL has piloted quantum route optimisation for parcel delivery networks across multiple cities simultaneously.

The Threat to Current Encryption

Most of the encryption securing the internet today, including the RSA and elliptic curve algorithms that protect your online banking, email, and government communications, relies on the mathematical difficulty of factoring very large numbers. These are problems that would take a classical computer longer than the age of the universe to solve for sufficiently large keys.

In 1994, mathematician Peter Shor published an algorithm showing that a quantum computer with enough qubits and sufficiently low error rates could factor large numbers exponentially faster than any classical algorithm. If a large, fault-tolerant quantum computer were built today, RSA encryption would be broken within hours, compromising virtually all secure internet communications simultaneously.

The Post-Quantum Response

The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology ran a multi-year global competition to develop quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms. In 2024, NIST finalised the first three post-quantum cryptographic standards, based on mathematical problems believed to be hard even for quantum computers. Governments and organisations worldwide are now in the process of transitioning their systems to these new standards before a capable quantum computer can be built.