The concept of quantum computing has always intrigued me, particularly due to its speculated capability of breaking encryption. Some sources on the Internet suggest that quantum computers are roughly a decade away from achieving the stability and capability required to decrypt modern encryption.

I used to think that this milestone was much closer. In fact, I had heard that once quantum computers reached 200 qubits, this would be possible. However, we are currently at 200 qubits in certain systems, and some quantum computers even have over 1,000 qubits (as per Google):

As of March 12, 2025, the quantum computer with the most qubits is the 1,180-qubit system developed by Atom Computing, a California-based startup specializing in neutral atom quantum technology. Here's a more detailed breakdown:

Atom Computing's 1,180-qubit system: This system uses neutral atoms trapped by lasers in a 2-dimensional grid, which allows for easy scaling and the addition of more qubits.

IBM's Condor processor: It has 1,121 qubits, but Atom Computing's system has a higher qubit count.

After some research, its not necessarily the pure number of qubits. Physical qubits are error-prone. Breaking encryption would require 'logical qubits' (aka error-corrected qubits), and thousands of physical qubits are needed to create a single logical qubit. Quantum Error Correction (QEC) seems to be a topic worthy of an entirely new blog post.

According to DeepSeek:

Approximately 4,000–8,000 logical qubits are required to factor a 2,048-bit number using Shor's algorithm.

As such, it does look like we are quite far away from building a Quantum Computer capable of breaking modern encryption.