NEC walks away

After roughly three decades of work on superconducting circuits and solid-state qubits, NEC has reportedly stopped building physical quantum computers. It will focus on applications instead.

The engineers went to Fujitsu

Several engineers on the program, including a senior research figure, moved across to rival Fujitsu to keep doing the same work.

It used to own the chip world

NEC ranked first globally in semiconductor sales in 1990, ahead of Hitachi, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Motorola and Intel. Intel passed it once PC processors became the money.

They built the first qubit

In 1999 NEC researchers produced the earliest known solid-state qubit. Variants of that breakthrough now sit inside quantum processors built by Google and IBM.

“Its researchers produced the earliest known solid-state qubit, a milestone still referenced widely across the quantum computing field.”

A ten-year retreat

NEC dropped DRAM into a joint venture in 1999, spun off its remaining chip units in 2002, and that spinoff became Renesas. Quantum hardware was the last piece to go.

Fujitsu is scaling up

Fujitsu and Riken launched a 256-qubit superconducting machine last year, want to pass 1,000 qubits in 2026, and are targeting over 10,000 before fiscal 2030.

Deep expertise wasn't enough

NEC hasn't called this a full exit from quantum research, and says it will keep chasing commercial uses. But the signal is clear: the hardware bill is too big for the near-term return.

“even firms with decades of deep expertise increasingly view quantum hardware as commercially unviable in the short term”