With computing giants such as Google and Microsoft, along with a host of labs and start-ups all pledging to build the first quantum computer, the quantum race is set to heat up this new year.

This piece in the Nature journal outlines the newest endeavours by Google and more recently by Microsoft, as well as by academic labs and quantum computing start-ups alike.

Google is hoping to perform quantum computation beyond the most powerful ‘classical’ supercomputers this year, by harnessing superconductivity in a project they began in 2014. Microsoft on the other hand plan to work on an unproven concept, topological quantum computing, and hope to perform a first demonstration on the technology.

Christopher Monroe, physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park who co-founded the start-up IonQ, noticed “people are really building things […] It’s no longer just research.”