Quantum Computing's Biggest Problem Was Never Speed. A Metal Alloy Might Fix It.

Quantum computers can already do calculations 13,000 times faster than the world's best supercomputer. The problem? They can't do them twice and get the same answer.

That's the dirty secret of quantum computing in 2026. Speed was never the bottleneck. Stability was. And a team of Norwegian physicists might have just found the material to fix it.

Two Rare Metals Walk Into a Lab

Professor Jacob Linder runs the QuSpin research centre at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His team, working with experimental physicists in Italy, published a paper in Physical Review Letters this month that the journal flagged as an editor's recommendation.

Their finding: a niobium-rhenium alloy called NbRe appears to behave like a triplet superconductor.

If you're not a physicist, here's why that matters.

Regular superconductors — the "singlet" kind — let electricity flow with zero resistance. No energy lost as heat. That's useful but limited. The particles carrying the current don't carry spin.

Spin is a property of electrons. Think of it as a tiny compass needle that can point up or down. In quantum computing, spin is how you encode information. It's the language qubits speak.

Triplet superconductors carry both electricity and spin with zero resistance. Zero. That means information moves through the material without losing anything.

"We can now transport not only electrical currents but also spin currents with absolutely zero resistance," Linder said.

Physicists have been hunting for triplet superconductors for decades. Linder calls them "a kind of holy grail in quantum technology."

Why Stability Kills Quantum Computers

Here's the core tension. A qubit can exist as both 0 and 1 at the same time. That's what makes quantum computers powerful. It's also what makes them fragile.

The slightest disturbance — heat, vibration, a stray electromagnetic field — collapses that dual state. The qubit picks 0 or 1, and your calculation breaks. This is called decoherence, and it's the reason quantum computers today need to operate at temperatures colder than outer space.

Even then, errors pile up fast. IBM expects to reach fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2029. Google's Willow chip showed that a quantum system can get more stable as it scales — a first. But we're still years from machines reliable enough for real-world problems.

Triplet superconductors attack this from the material level. If the stuff your quantum computer is built from can move information without losing it, you've removed one of the biggest sources of error.

There's another piece. Triplet superconductors can host Majorana particles — exotic objects that are their own antiparticles. Majorana particles are promising candidates for topological qubits, a type of qubit that's inherently resistant to environmental noise.

Microsoft's been chasing this for years. In February 2025, they unveiled Majorana 1, a chip designed to use topological qubits. Their approach uses indium arsenide and aluminum cooled to near absolute zero. If triplet superconductors like NbRe can generate Majorana particles more reliably, it opens a second path to the same goal.

Three Breakthroughs, One Month

The NbRe discovery didn't happen in isolation. February 2026 was the most productive month for quantum computing in years.

IonQ and Ansys demonstrated the first practical quantum advantage in engineering. Running a medical device simulation on IonQ's 36-qubit trapped-ion computer, they beat classical high-performance computing by 12%. Not on an abstract benchmark. On a real engineering problem. Google's Quantum Echoes algorithm, running on 65 of Willow's qubits, performed 13,000 times faster than the best classical algorithm on the Frontier supercomputer. More importantly, the results are verifiable — run the same calculation twice, get the same answer. That's new. The NbRe triplet superconductor attacks the problem from below — at the material level. If confirmed, it gives hardware designers a new building block that's been missing from their toolkit for decades.

Three different teams. Three different approaches. Speed (Google), practical use (IonQ), and stability (NTNU). All in one month.

The Caution

Linder is careful. "It is still too early to conclude once and for all whether the material is a triplet superconductor," he said. "The finding must be verified by other experimental groups."

NbRe works at about 7 Kelvin — roughly minus 266 degrees Celsius. That's cold by any standard, but it's warm for superconductor research. Many quantum systems already operate in this temperature range, which makes NbRe potentially compatible with existing hardware.

Both niobium and rhenium are rare metals. Scaling production of NbRe for commercial quantum computers would be a separate challenge entirely. But that's a manufacturing problem, not a physics problem. Physics problems are harder.

Why This Matters Beyond the Lab

The quantum computing market sits at about $1.4 billion today. Projections range from $4 billion to $20 billion by 2030, depending on who's counting. The wild variation tells you something: nobody knows how fast this will move because nobody knows when stability will be solved.

That's why the NbRe finding matters more than another speed record. Speed without reliability is a party trick. Google can run a calculation 13,000 times faster than a supercomputer, but if the answer is wrong 30% of the time, you still can't use it for drug discovery or climate modelling.

The companies betting biggest on quantum — Google, IBM, Microsoft, IonQ — are all spending more on error correction than on raw performance. IBM's entire roadmap to 2029 is built around reducing errors, not adding qubits. Microsoft bet its quantum strategy on topological qubits specifically because they're more stable.

A confirmed triplet superconductor would give all of them a new tool. Not a finished product. A material that does something no other known material can do: move quantum information without losing it.

The Bigger Picture

Quantum computing has been "five years away" for twenty years. That joke lands because it's been true. Every speed milestone gets headlines. The stability milestones — the ones that actually determine when quantum computers become useful — get buried in physics journals.

NbRe might not be the answer. It needs independent verification. It needs more testing. It needs to work at scale, not just in a lab in Trondheim.

But the fact that three separate breakthroughs converged in a single month — one in speed, one in practical application, one in the materials that make both possible — suggests something's shifting.

The question for quantum computing was never "can we make it fast?" It was always "can we make it work?"

A niobium-rhenium alloy in a Norwegian lab might be part of that answer.