Guest Post By Sudiptaa Paul Choudhury is Chief Marketing Officer at QNu Labs, a global leader in quantum cybersecurity, TEDx speaker and a LinkedIn Top Voice.
Quantum computing has stopped being a laboratory curiosity. McKinsey’s Quantum Technology Monitor 2026 estimates that quantum computing could unlock up to 2.7 trillion US dollars in economic value worldwide by 2035, and finds that quantum computing companies already generated more than a billion dollars in revenue in 2025. An analysis by the Quantum Insider projects that the sector will add more than a trillion dollars to the global economy between 2025 and 2035 and create 250,000 new jobs by 2030, rising to 840,000 by 2035. That commercial momentum carries a less comfortable corollary. The same computational power that will optimise supply chains and accelerate drug discovery will, in time, be capable of breaking the encryption that currently protects the world’s financial transactions, health records, defence communications and personal data. The race to build quantum-safe infrastructure has already begun, and it needs people who do not yet exist in nearly enough numbers.
The first threat is not theoretical, and it is not waiting politely for quantum computers to arrive. Security researchers describe a strategy known as “harvest now, decrypt later”, in which adversaries intercept and store encrypted data today with the intention of decrypting it once a sufficiently powerful quantum computer becomes available. Data with a long shelf life, government archives, patient records, and intellectual property, is exposed the moment it is intercepted, regardless of when the decryption capability finally arrives. This is precisely the risk the White House cited when it signed its most recent executive order on the subject.
