NEC halts quantum computer project after decades of research

NEC, the Japanese tech giant that helped launch the superconducting quantum computing era, has officially stopped developing quantum computer hardware. The company pulled the plug at the end of March 2026, closing a chapter that began nearly three decades ago with one of the most consequential breakthroughs in the field. The reason is brutally simple: the money doesn’t make sense. NEC concluded that the timeline to commercially viable quantum systems was too long, and the return on investment too uncertain, to keep pouring resources into hardware development while US firms like IBM and Google continue to outspend and outscale Japanese competitors. From pioneer to pragmatist This isn’t some bit player exiting the quantum race. In 1999, NEC demonstrated the world’s first superconducting solid-state qubit, a breakthrough that essentially laid the groundwork for the architectures IBM and Google later adopted and scaled into multi-hundred-qubit processors. The company isn’t abandoning the quantum space entirely, though. NEC plans to redirect its focus toward quantum annealing, a more specialized approach to optimization problems, along with quantum-inspired computing that runs on conven...