Quantum computing has long been announced as “just around the corner,” but several companies are now determined to make this a commercial reality, with the promise of solving complex problems beyond classical computers’ reach.

The problems in question are wide-ranging, from medicine and cybersecurity to materials science and chemistry. But first, there are very practical problems to be solved, such as developing chips that can reliably host large numbers of qubits — short for quantum bits, the fundamental unit of information in quantum computing.