Aug. 15, 2025 –
During my visit to the National Quantum Computing Center (NQCC) in the U.K. this week, a few things were clear: there’s value from different modalities of deploying qubits; the value of quantum computing isn’t just from deploying a million-qubit machine; and that quantum computing is already here now and solving problems.
Michael Cuthbert, director of the NQCC, told EE Times, “Quantum computing is here and it’s here now. Machines that you can use and write code on, you can pay to access those now. We see value in quantum computing from small scale to large scale, and it’s not just about building a million qubits.”
He explained that the pathway to both adoption and usefulness of quantum computing either today or in the future is in ensuring that deployment fits into existing workflows. “We need to be able to look at workflows in real life, for example, in a hospital, and how you can plug into it to solve a problem for the practitioner.”
In that respect, the NQCC has put together a use case compendium, highlighting 19 use cases through its SparQ quantum computing readiness program. These use cases range from quantum machine learning techniques for fraud detection in credit card transactions led by Unisys, to clustering data in cancer research, to optimizing communications in field sensor networks to support disaster response operations.
Often, regardless of sector or application, the underlying algorithms can be the same. Cuthbert explained, “Take anomaly detection. Quantum computing is useful for finding signals in noise, and the same algorithm can be used whether it’s in finance for fraud detection, in health for identifying cancer cells, and in defense, for spotting something that shouldn’t be there.”
The NQCC’s role is to support the scaling of quantum computing in the U.K., involving both the companies developing quantum computing technology as well as the user community. In 2024, the British government awarded £30 million through the NQCC to support seven quantum computing testbeds – with the money being used to explore how to accelerate the development of scalable quantum computers by enabling detailed characterization and benchmarking of early-stage machines.
Cuthbert said, “This is part of the government’s role in de-risking deployment and user adoption. There are seven different providers here utilizing different qubit modalities. There’s a genuine challenge in deploying machines to customer premises, so NQCC is playing the role of the alpha customer, and we also have collaborations across industry.”