Nikolai Petrov
Nikolai covers emerging deep-tech themes and the policy environment shaping them, including export controls, standards, and government procurement.
Articles by Nikolai Petrov
SEALSQ's FIPS 140-3 Headline Is for a Chip With No Post-Quantum Algorithms. The Same Release Moves Its Post-Quantum Chip's First Lab Report From March to October
NIST Certificate No. 5463 covers the VaultIC408, a conventional AES, RSA and ECDSA secure element, and the company says so in its own text. The 'updated' QS7001 timetable puts the V1 hardware evaluation report in October 2026 and V2 in January 2027, against March and September in the timetable published in March.
The Argonne-JPMorganChase QAOA Result Hit the Quantum Wires This Week. The Peer-Reviewed Paper Was Published on June 16
Physical Review Letters published "Spin-Boson Mapping of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm" on June 16, 2026. Argonne's release came September 1 and the trade coverage September 3 — and the efficiency numbers everyone is repeating sit in the arXiv preprint, not in the press material.
A Rare Look at What People Actually Run on Quantum Hardware: 6-Qubit Circuits, Two-Minute Queues and Price Doing the Steering
Quantum Rings has published summer usage data covering six QPUs from four vendors. The median job is six qubits, most circuits the study could classify are benchmarks rather than applications, and the cheapest machine on the network took 57% of completed jobs. The data is the vendor's own, about its own platform.
IonQ, qBraid and NVIDIA Publicise a 54% Error-Rate Cut on Six Qubits. The Paper Is a Preprint, and the Number Is a Best Case
A trapped-ion experiment combining stabilizer verification with mid-circuit measurement reports up to a 54% lower logical error rate on a six-qubit Trotter step, in an arXiv preprint that has not been peer reviewed. The company blog's headline caveat tracks the paper's own abstract; the paper's results section is narrower than either.
Xanadu Puts Calendar Years on Fault Tolerance. It Has Not Yet Put Papers Behind Them
The photonic quantum company told investors on Monday it expects fault tolerance in 2028 or 2029 and more than 1,000 logical qubits by 2031. The roadmap is dense with numbers, but every one of them is a target rather than a measured, published result, and the release cites no journal paper or preprint.
Pasqal Closes Its SPAC Merger With About $360m in Cash and Lists on Nasdaq as PSQL
The French neutral-atom quantum computing company completed its combination with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II and began trading on August 28. Redemptions left it with roughly $360m rather than the $500m of gross proceeds originally anticipated, and the first-day percentage gain differs sharply depending on which reference price is used.
Nvidia Broke Out $14.8 Billion of Networking Revenue in Its April Quarter. The August Release Publishes No Split at All.
One quarter after separating data-center compute from networking, Nvidia's fiscal Q2 release gives Data Center as a single $89.0 billion narrative figure and no split at all — removing the coarsest public proxy the optics and interconnect supply chain had for attach rates.
IonQ Says Its Laser Terminals Have Reached 84 On Orbit. It Published That Number Nineteen Days Earlier.
IonQ announced a milestone on Monday for Skyloom terminals aboard satellites that launched on July 16. The same count of 84 already appeared as a bullet in IonQ's August 5 second-quarter release, which did not break out what the business earns.
IonQ Joins Canada's Quantum Sandbox Provider List — Under a Non-Binding MOU With No Disclosed Payment
IonQ and CMC Microsystems said Tuesday they had signed a memorandum of understanding to make IonQ's trapped-ion systems available through the FABrIC Quantum Computing Sandbox. The release states the MOU is non-binding, obligates neither party to buy or supply anything, and can be terminated by either side. No payment to IonQ was disclosed.
Lakeside Holding Is Now Quanome Technologies On Nasdaq, Six Months After A $1.00 Sale Of Its Freight Arm
Shareholders approved selling American Bear Logistics for one dollar to an unnamed, unaffiliated buyer that agreed to assume all of the unit's liabilities. The August 5 rebrand announcement names no acquisition, partner or contract.
Quantinuum Takes Its Hardest Engineering Problem to Taiwan's Quanta Computer
Quantinuum Inc. (Nasdaq: QNT) signed a collaborative development agreement on Aug. 13 with Quanta Computer Inc. (Taiwan Stock Exchange: 2382) to jointly design the hardware infrastructure underneath its future trapped-ion systems. No financial terms, qubit counts, system names, volumes or roadmap dates were disclosed. What was disclosed is a change of subject: from physics milestones to whether the machine can be built more than once.
Same Program, Four Levels of Disclosure: What CHIPS Recipients Have Told Investors About the Government's Equity
Rigetti published a share-pricing formula. Infleqtion published a different one. D-Wave and Aeluma published none. All four are still waiting on definitive award documents that, as of Friday's close, none has said it has signed.
Baird's $1,250 AMD Target Rests on Two Numbers That Only Multiply Against a Smaller Market
Robert W. Baird's Tristan Gerra doubled his AMD target to a Street-high $1,250 from $625 on July 24, the day after AMD's Advancing AI event — not on Friday, as several accounts of Friday's 6.5% rally implied. The model, as relayed by secondary outlets and never quoted directly, has AMD earning $147 billion of AI GPU revenue in 2030 at roughly 15% share. Against the $1.4 trillion 2030 accelerator market Lisa Su forecast from the stage a day earlier, $147 billion is 10.5%, not 15% — though the outlets disagree on what the 15% is a share of. Here is what each assumption would require against what AMD, Nvidia and Broadcom are actually shipping.
Broadcom Falls 5.9% on a $370 Billion Number That Sources Cannot Define the Same Way Twice
Bank of America's credit desk cut Broadcom's issuer and bond ratings to Marketweight on Tuesday over its AI chip-leasing platform. By Friday the figure was on every wire — described as maximum residual value guarantee exposure in some accounts and as senior debt in others, sometimes by the same outlet. Those are not the same claim.
Xanadu's Cancer-Therapy Quantum Partnership Discloses No Dollars. What It Does Disclose Is More Interesting
Xanadu and the University of Alberta announced a research collaboration on Thursday to build quantum algorithms for photodynamic cancer therapy. No funding, term or scope was disclosed — but the underlying resource estimates, and Xanadu's own second-quarter numbers, say a lot about where photonic quantum computing actually stands.
Most of Listed Quantum's $2.6 Billion Second-Quarter Loss Never Left the Building
Five US-listed quantum pure-plays reported about $2.61 billion of combined GAAP net losses on about $98 million of second-quarter revenue. At least $1.83 billion of that total is itemised in the companies' own releases and filings as non-cash: warrant remeasurement, stock compensation and fair-value marks that move with the share price rather than the bank balance.
Cisco Booked $9.3 Billion of AI Orders and Lost 8.4% Anyway. The Margin Is the Message
Cisco beat on revenue and adjusted earnings, guided fiscal 2027 above consensus and raised its AI infrastructure ambitions. Shares still closed Thursday down 8.4%. The gap between order growth and gross margin is the read-through the whole AI networking supply chain now has to answer for.
DARPA Quietly Reopens Its Quantum Benchmarking Program to New Entrants, With Stage B Verdicts Still Pending
The Pentagon's research arm has extended the deadline on a fresh Stage A call for its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative to 30 November, keeping the door open to architectures that were not among the 11 teams already through to Stage B. For listed quantum pure-plays, the money is small; the scorecard is not.
Quantum Earnings Season Delivers a Split Verdict: IonQ Surges Past $80 Million as Rigetti and D-Wave Stay Small
A pivotal reporting week left the three most-watched pure-play quantum stocks telling very different revenue stories, even as all three continue to burn cash on the road to fault tolerance.
Quantinuum's First Report Card as a Public Company: $8 Million Quarter, $2.1 Billion War Chest and an Oracle Cloud Deal
Two months after the largest quantum IPO on record, the Honeywell-backed company delivered 279% revenue growth, steep losses and a Helios deployment inside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in its maiden earnings release.