In February 2025, an Israeli company that most Israelis have never heard of raised $170 million in a single funding round. Quantum Machines, founded in 2018 by three Weizmann-trained physicists and headquartered in Tel Aviv, now supplies the control technology used by more than half the companies in the world that are trying to build quantum computers — including, quietly, inside Google’s Willow programme. Its CEO Dr. Itamar Sivan calls quantum “one of the biggest, most important technological races of our generation.” He is not wrong, and Israel is further along in that race than its political class appears to understand.

Sixteen months ago, in December 2024, Google’s Willow chip crossed the error-correction threshold — the point at which adding more qubits reduces errors instead of amplifying them, which is the technical gate that separates quantum physics from quantum engineering. The quantum transition now runs on two clocks. One is commercial: global quantum investment reached $56 billion in 2025, up from $22 billion in 2020. The other is cryptographic, and it is the one Israel cannot afford to miss.

The cryptographic clock

Every secret Israel currently holds — diplomatic cables, intelligence intercepts, nuclear command authentication, banking infrastructure — is protected by mathematical problems that a sufficiently large quantum computer, running Peter Shor’s 1994 algorithm, will solve trivially. RSA, elliptic-curve cryptography, and Diffie-Hellman key exchange all depend on factoring or discrete logarithms. A fault-tolerant quantum computer of a few thousand logical qubits breaks them.

No such machine exists today. Credible estimates for when one will range from 2030 to 2040. But the clock did not start when the machine arrives. It started the day adversaries began harvesting encrypted Israeli traffic for later decryption — what NIST calls “harvest now, decrypt later.” Consider what this means concretely. A Mossad cable transmitted this week between Tel Aviv and a European station, intercepted by a hostile signals intelligence service and stored, will be readable in 2038. The source identified in that cable will be sixty-three years old. Their children will be adults. Whatever promises of protection were made to them are already void in principle, awaiting enforcement in practice.

The Iranian nuclear archive that Mossad extracted from Tehran in January 2018 was a triumph of human intelligence. The next such archive — the adversary’s equivalent, targeting Israel — may be a triumph of patience and storage capacity. The United States has mandated federal migration to post-quantum cryptographic standards, the lattice-based and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)