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Forbes Council — May 11, 2026
Russ Garcia is CEO of Menlo Micro. He has more than 30 years of experience in the electronic systems and semiconductor industries.
Machine learning is the hottest topic in computing today, but what may become the most consequential development is being explored at temperatures close to absolute zero.
This is where quantum states replace binary ones and zeros, enabling a computing paradigm that promises to answer otherwise impossible questions. For quantum computing, cold is the new hot.
The Quantum Advantage
In quantum computing, a qubit (quantum bit) represents all possible states of that bit until its value is measured, at which point it collapses to either 0 or 1.
This is of limited practical advantage for one qubit, but when a set of qubits becomes entangled, their states can become correlated thanks to what Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance.”
Together, the qubits then represent all possible combinations of their individual states. Quantum gates can act on these qubits to perform computations on all possible states at once.
Measurement then collapses the quantum system's state from a probabilistic superposition to a definite result.
Quantum computation is expected to have advantages for tackling problems that are highly combinatorial and so have very large search or optimization spaces; strongly affected by quantum phenomena themselves, e.g., for simulations of chemical reactions or physical processes; or based on mathematical forms that have been specially developed to be addressable by quantum algorithms.
