The US Department of Energy has released a national roadmap for quantum computing, and it wants scientific usefulness measured over raw qubit count

[Its_Jackson62]

The US Department of Energy's Office of Science has released a national quantum computing roadmap titled the SCAC Quantum Committee Report, Path to an Integrated Quantum Future, developed following a field wide effort with hundreds of contributors drawn from national laboratories, academia, industry and federal agencies. The subcommittee behind the report was chaired by Dr Anna Grassellino, Fermilab's chief technology officer and an associate laboratory director, alongside vice chair Dr Supratik Guha of the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

The roadmap lays out a three phase framework for the coming years, beginning with Phase I running from 2026 through 2028, centred on Quantum Grand Challenges, a set of multidisciplinary competitions specifically targeting demonstrable scientific utility by 2028. Phase II calls for establishing a dedicated DOE Quantum Computing User Facility to serve as a shared collaborative research instrument for the wider scientific community, while Phase III, beginning in 2030 and beyond, envisions genuine integration of quantum systems with the high performance computing and AI networks already running across DOE's national laboratories.

The roadmap's central philosophy is a deliberate shift away from measuring progress purely through hardware metrics like raw qubit counts, stating explicitly that success must be measured by scientific utility rather than simply building the largest quantum computer possible. That reframing points specifically toward solving otherwise intractable problems in areas including drug discovery, catalyst design, fusion materials and fundamental physics research, positioning genuine scientific output as the metric that ultimately matters most.

DOE releases national quantum computing roadmap following field-wide effort led by SCAC subcommitteenews.fnal.gov