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Google's Willow quantum chip achieved two major milestones simultaneously: it performed a computation in under five minutes that would take today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years, and it demonstrated below-threshold quantum error correction — errors decrease exponentially as qubits scale. Willow uses superconducting qubits requiring cryogenic infrastructure.

An international research team achieved the first quantum teleportation of a photon's polarization state between two physically separate quantum dots, connected by a 270-meter open-air optical link. Teleportation fidelity reached 82% plus or minus 1%, exceeding the classical threshold by more than ten standard deviations. The breakthrough resolves a foundational constraint: all prior quantum teleportation required both photons to originate from the same source.

Qunnect and Cisco demonstrated the first metro-scale quantum entanglement network over deployed commercial fiber in February 2026, spanning 17.6 kilometers connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan through New York City's existing telecom infrastructure. The GothamQ testbed achieved record entanglement swapping rates exceeding 5,400 entangled pairs per hour - nearly 10,000 times better than previous benchmarks. Endpoint nodes operate at room temperature; the Manhattan hub uses cryogenic cooling. The first commercial quantum network operating on existing fiber infrastructure.

DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 solved the protein folding problem, predicting the 3D structure of virtually every known protein with remarkable accuracy. Its core neural network architecture is named the Evoformer — the evolutionary transformer. AlphaFold 2 received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.