This is your Enterprise Quantum Weekly podcast.

Have you ever watched a crew recover a lost ship at the bottom of the ocean, only to realize it was just a blurry image—until someone finally shows you the nameplate on the hull? That’s what it felt like for me, Leo, this week at Google Quantum AI, standing in the chilled, neon-lit lab where the Willow processor hums, finally delivering what we’ve promised for decades: not just a quantum event, but a verifiable quantum leap—something you can measure, touch, and crucially, trust.

Just 24 hours ago, colleagues Hartmut Neven, Vadim Smelyanskiy, and the team at UC Berkeley revealed the world’s first practical demonstration of a quantum algorithm that delivers real-world answers 13,000 times faster than even the world’s most powerful supercomputer—a milestone we’re calling Quantum Echoes. As described on the Google Research Blog, this isn’t just another academic exercise; it’s the first time a quantum processor has run an algorithm that produces verifiable, scientifically meaningful data, and does so at a speed classical computers simply can’t match. You heard me right: solving a problem that would take the Frontier supercomputer nearly 3.2 years in just a couple of hours.

Picture this: the Willow chip, with its 65 superconducting qubits, whirring away at a solution to an out-of-time-order correlator—an OTOC, if we’re speaking quantum jargon. This quantum echo, as I call it, measures how information spreads—and scrambles—in the quantum world, just like sonar bouncing off a ship’s hull, but on an unimaginably tiny scale. In our lab, we fed this algorithm real data from nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments, the same technology used in hospital MRI machines, but now applied to understanding the atomic structure of complex molecules.

Here’s the kicker: for the first time, we can cross-check Willow’s answers not just with more computing, but by literally asking nature itself. We measured molecules and compared our quantum model to the real world—and they matched. This means, for example, we can now imagine helping a chemist discover a new drug by modeling exactly how it binds to a protein. Or accelerating the development of materials for solar cells, batteries, even fusion reactors—areas where every atom’s position matters.

This breakthrough, documented in Nature, feels like the moment the telescope first revealed Jupiter’s moons or the microscope uncovered bacteria—tools that let us see deeper, not just farther. The Willow runs the Quantum Echoes algorithm, sweeping through the quantum wilderness, bringing back data we couldn’t even imagine collecting before. And it’s verifiable. Repeat the experiment on another quantum computer, or do it in the lab: the results align. That’s real scientific progress.

This week also saw governments and major enterprises—from India’s massive new Rs 4,500 crore quantum initiative to the Trump administration’s fresh push for quantum equity deals—begin to treat quantum computing not as a curiosity, but as a cornerstone of global competitiveness. As Professor Bhanu Das at TCG CREST put it, we’re not just racing for speed, we’re redefining what computation itself means. For enterprise, this means quantum chemistry, materials science, and even cybersecurity are about to change forever—if, and only if, we can scale these breakthroughs, and make them robust.

But here’s the catch: for all the drama, we’re still at the beginning. The willow is mighty, but we are not yet at the level of quantum supremacy required to break modern encryption or model truly massive systems. As Sam Jaques at the University of Waterloo reminds us, the path to, say, a quantum computer that can crack RSA-2048 is long, with software and hardware milestones yet to cross. Microsoft, for instance, continues to bet on topological qubits—qubits that, if realized, would make error correction almost trivial....