IBM Research has a goal of scaling quantum systems to a size where they’ll be capable of solving the world’s most challenging problems. IBM wants to deploy a quantum-centric supercomputer powered by 100,000 qubits by 2033.
IBM has laid out a roadmap to reach 1000 qubit processors this year and 4000 qubits within two years.
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These scale computing power exponentially,aren’t they approaching the point where they can factor the large numbers used for cybersecurity?
Not really. Here’s a paper from 2019 that shows how to factor rsa 2048 using only 20 million noisy qbits in about 8 hours. https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09749. Believe it or not, this was a significant advancement in the state of the art.
Meanwhile, the cybersecurity world is moving towards quantum resistant encryption algorithms faster than quantum computers are developing. NIST has already selected their primary algorithms for this purpose https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography/selected-algorithms-2022
IMO, the biggest impacts of quantum computing are going to be in physics, chemistry, and material science, where they can simulate systems that are practically impossible to simulate today.