Practical Paths for Quantum: QuEra’s 3×3 Playbook to Turn Promise into Business Value
At Quantum World Congress 2025, Yuval Boger, Chief Commercial Officer of QuEra Computing, made the case that neutral-atom architectures are not just scientifically exciting—they are an increasingly practical route to large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers that real users can access today.
Boger opened by situating QuEra’s roots in deep academic collaboration. Born out of work at Harvard and MIT, the Boston-based company now operates globally, with systems and offices in Japan and the United Kingdom as part of national quantum initiatives. That close partnership with leading universities is, as he put it, a key part of QuEra’s “secret sauce” and a major reason the company sees itself as both a scientific and commercial leader in neutral-atom quantum computing. QuEra’s first 256-qubit system on Amazon Braket is about to hit its third year of continuous cloud operation, underscoring that these are not one-off lab experiments but production systems serving customers worldwide. The company has raised more than $230 million in funding from investors including Google, SoftBank, and most recently NVIDIA.
The core of Boger’s talk focused on why QuEra chose neutral atoms as its platform. Neutral atoms like rubidium are “natural qubits”—identical by definition, without the fabrication variability that plagues manufactured qubits. That means in principle you can scale to very large numbers of qubits without worrying about device-to-device inconsistencies. Their systems run at room temperature and consume on the order of tens of kilowatts, a negligible draw in high-performance computing environments. Using finely tuned laser fields, QuEra traps and moves individual atoms, enabling all-to-all connectivity: any qubit can interact directly with any other. That mobility unlocks more efficient algorithms and powerful error-correction schemes that are difficult or impossible to implement on fixed-layout architectures.
To help customers understand where the broader industry truly stands, Boger introduced a three-stage, nine-point checklist that QuEra uses as a vendor-neutral maturity framework. The first stage, foundational capabilities, asks whether a platform can provide stable qubits, accurate operations, and adaptive circuits that can change based on mid-circuit measurements. QuEra believes it has clearly demonstrated the first two through its long-running 256-qubit machine on AWS and is actively advancing adaptive capabilities.
The second stage centers on error correction: constructing logical qubits from many physical qubits, showing that logical error rates improve over physical ones, demonstrating scalability, and implementing universal logical operations that include the difficult non-Clifford gates. Here, Boger highlighted QuEra’s work on magic state distillation and logical circuits running on a deployed gate-based neutral-atom system in Japan. Video of atoms being dynamically rearranged illustrated how shuttling qubits in hardware can enable more efficient circuits with fewer cycles, a core advantage of the architecture. QuEra is collaborating on these efforts with government labs including Los Alamos National Laboratory, NURC, and DARPA programs.
“Our goal isn’t to build a billion-dollar, football-field-sized quantum machine. It’s to build the 777 of quantum computing—powerful, reliable, and affordable enough for universities and Fortune 500s alike.”
The third stage focuses on “mass quantum advantage”: proving that quantum systems can deliver faster, cheaper, or more accurate results than classical methods on real problems, while operating as production-grade, deployable systems. Boger was candid that no one—QuEra included—has yet demonstrated full-blown quantum advantage at scale. However, QuEra has already checked two of the three boxes here: its systems run reliably for more than 130 hours per week on the cloud with strict service expectations, and the company is actively deploying on-premise and hybrid systems. He cited applications from defect classification in manufacturing to weather forecasting for financial clients, as well as life sciences projects on antibiotic design, where quantum machine learning has shown promising performance on small datasets compared to classical methods.
Looking ahead, Boger underscored QuEra’s partnership with NVIDIA on the NVAQC advanced computing center in Boston as a preview of how quantum and AI will co-evolve. The goal, he said, is to build the “777 of quantum computing”—a workhorse system that is powerful, reliable, and affordable enough for mid-sized universities and Fortune 500 companies, not just billion-dollar megaprojects. QuEra engages with customers through system access (cloud and on-premise), collaborative R&D, and co-design of application code tailored to the unique strengths of neutral-atom platforms.
His closing message to the audience was straightforward: talk is cheap. Roadmaps and slideware are easy; deployed systems, logical error correction, and clear progress against an objective checklist are what really matter. By that measure, QuEra believes it is already demonstrating a practical, near-term path toward large-scale quantum computing.
