NEC quietly walks away from three decades of quantum computing work

[Pat73]

NEC has apparently stopped building physical quantum computers after roughly thirty years of research into superconducting circuits and solid state qubit technology. The company is instead expected to shift toward quantum applications while avoiding the enormous costs tied to actually developing physical hardware. Several engineers connected to the program, including at least one senior research figure, reportedly moved over to rival Fujitsu to continue their work there instead.

What makes this notable is just how foundational NEC's early research actually was to the entire field. Back in 1999 the company produced the earliest known solid state qubit, a milestone still referenced widely across quantum computing research today. Variants of that original breakthrough apparently underpin processors currently being developed separately by both Google and IBM, which makes NEC's exit feel almost like watching a pioneer walk away from a field it genuinely helped create in the first place.

The article also traces NEC's broader decline in the semiconductor industry, noting the company once ranked first globally in chip sales back in 1990, ahead of Hitachi, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Motorola, and even Intel at the time. That dominance eroded gradually over roughly a decade of restructuring, with NEC abandoning its DRAM operations in 1999 and eventually spinning off its remaining chip units into what became Renesas Electronics. Quantum hardware apparently just did not fit naturally into NEC's current business focus on IT services, enterprise systems, and defense work anymore.

Meanwhile Fujitsu is moving in the opposite direction entirely, having already launched a quantum computer built around 256 superconducting qubits with research partner Riken, and reportedly targeting over 1,000 qubits sometime this year with an eventual goal of exceeding 10,000 qubits before 2030. The contrast between one Japanese tech giant retreating while another accelerates its own quantum ambitions is a pretty striking split within the same national industry

NEC spent decades developing quantum hardware, but itwww.techradar.com