10,000 Qubits to Run Shor’s Algorithm

Caute_cautim — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:47:32 GMT

Hi All

1 Mar 2026 – On the same day that Google Quantum AI published its landmark ECDLP-256 resource estimates showing fewer than 500,000 superconducting qubits could break cryptocurrency cryptography in minutes, a team from Oratomic, Caltech, and UC Berkeley quietly dropped a paper making an even more startling claim about qubit count: Shor’s algorithm can be executed at cryptographically relevant scales with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable neutral atom qubits.

The paper, titled “Shor’s algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits,“ is authored by Madelyn Cain, Qian Xu, Robbie King, Lewis Picard, Harry Levine, Manuel Endres, John Preskill, Hsin-Yuan Huang, and Dolev Bluvstein. The team spans Oratomic — a new quantum computing startup based in Pasadena — Caltech, and UC Berkeley. For those tracking the field, the names Bluvstein (who led Harvard’s landmark neutral atom fault-tolerance demonstrations), Preskill (one of the founders of quantum error correction theory), and Endres (Caltech atomic physics) signal exceptional technical credibility.

The two papers are not independent. Oratomic’s ECC-256 resource estimates explicitly use Google’s newly published circuit compilations — the same circuits verified by Google’s zero-knowledge proof. Google showed the circuits are efficient. Oratomic shows those circuits can run on dramatically fewer physical qubits — but on a fundamentally different type of machine, with fundamentally different implications for the threat timeline.

https://postquantum.com/security-pqc/10000-qubits-shors/

Regards

Caute_Cautim

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10,000 Qubits to Run Shor’s Algorithm