Hello to the thread! Let’s start with a disclaimer: although I’ve been seriously studying quantum computing for the past year in an EU inter-university “quantum expertise accelerator,” my understanding of quantum mechanics underlying computing technology, for example, is completely non-existent, and therefore some of my claims might be utter nonsense 
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If we start with the industry’s growth prospects and potential, these are, in my view, undeniable. While quantum computing is, at least in my opinion, already a reality today, for example, in the defense industry, it’s probably quite pointless to consider the current hype and/or any key figure-based valuations in these investments. We’re talking about VC-type investing here, and the smartest approach is likely to look at who, in terms of probabilities, has the right technology choices, the most competent R&D, the most credible customers, the deepest-pocketed investors, etc. If you’re not just looking for quick wins, these current market caps of a few billion are negligible if/when workloads can be broadly shifted from binary transistors to qubits for processing.
In a way, quantum is, in my opinion, a relatively easy sector in the stock market. The opportunity space is quite limited, and the capital requirements are insane (expertise and funding) – the probability game isn’t impossible from my perspective. I believe the big winners in the near future can already be narrowed down to perhaps about ten listed companies and a couple of other unlisted players (pleasingly, IQM from Finland is one of these players).
In my opinion, the most critical factor reducing probabilities is processing technology – and at least for me, this is where my focus is most intently. It now appears that superconductivity and ion traps are the ones vying for dominance (though there are others, of course). Superconductivity likely offers better scaling potential if breakthroughs are ever made in key bottlenecks, whereas ion traps require engineering innovations rather than physicists’ breakthroughs.
In my view, the most central quantum technological challenge for the ultimate breakthrough is the quantum memory coherence problems. Small errors in runtime quantum computing (the correction of which is now rapidly improving) are minor compared to the fact that qubit information might remain in memory for a maximum of a few seconds. Many have yearned for quantum computing as a solution to, for example, AI’s energy consumption challenges, but a modern-day Einstein would practically need to solve this problem first so that a model could be stored in memory and wouldn’t need to be retrained with every inference command.
I also believe that the corporate landscape will still change significantly here. It’s unlikely, for example, that Nvidia, sitting on tens of billions in cash reserves, will wait idly by for some quantum venture worth a couple of billion to take away its HPC computing business. Similarly, Google, for instance, has the muscle to buy out competitors or competing technologies to prevent disruption, as that Willow wasn’t a mega-announcement yet.
IonQ is my bet alongside the tech giants. IonQ seems to be in a very good position from many perspectives. Of course, the ion trap must be the winning choice in this case. IonQ also has a CUDA-type platform under development (excluding the SDK). If history can teach us anything, it’s very likely that there will ultimately be 1-2 big winners during its breakthrough penetration, and they will have the opportunity to lock users into their platform for years or decades.
PS. If you have time during the Christmas holiday, I recommend practicing quantum programming, for example, as offered by CSC. In a couple of hours, you can get a very good understanding of the practical functioning of the most essential basic concepts of quantum computing: Noppe
