Cisco’s Quantum Labs research team, part of Outshift by Cisco, has announced that they have completed a complete software solution prototype. The latest part is the Cisco Quantum Complier prototype, designed for distributed quantum computing across networked processors. In short, it allows a network of quantum computers, of all types, to participate in solving a single problem. Even better, this new compiler supports distributed quantum error correction. Instead of a quantum computer needing to have a huge number of qbits itself, the load can be spread out among multiple quantum computers. This coordination is handled across a quantum network, powered by Cisco’s Quantum Network entanglement chip, which was announced in May 2025. This network could also be used to secure communications for traditional servers as well.

For some quick background – one of the factors holding quantum computers back is the lack of quantity and quality when it comes to qubits. Most of the amazing things quantum computers can in theory do require thousands or millions of qubits. Today we have systems with around a thousand qubits. But those qubits need to be quality qubits. Qubits are extremely susceptible to outside interference. Qubits need to be available in quantity as well as quality. To fix the quality problem, there has been a considerable amount of work performed on error correction for qubits. But again, most quantum error correction routines require even more qubits to create logical ‘stable’ qubits. Research has been ongoing across the industry – everyone is looking for a way to create large amounts of stable qubits.

What Cisco is proposing is that instead of making a single quantum processor bigger to have more qubits, multiple quantum processors can be strung together with their quantum networking technology and the quality of the transmitted qubits should be ensured with distributed error correction. It’s an intriguing idea – as Cisco more or less points out we didn’t achieve scale with traditional computing by simply making a single CPU bigger and bigger until it could handle all tasks. Instead, multiple CPUs were integrated on a server and then those servers networked together to share the load. That makes good sense, and it’s an interesting approach. Just like with traditional CPUs, quantum processors will not suddenly stop growing – but if this works it will allow scaling of those quantum processors on a smaller scale, possibly ushering in useful, practical quantum computing sooner.

Is this the breakthrough needed to bring about the quantum computing revolution? At this point it’s a prototype – not an extensively tested method. Quantum computing requires so much fundamental physics research and is so complicated that its extremely hard to say if what Cisco is suggesting can usher in that new quantum age. But it is extremely interesting, and it will certainly be worth watching this approach as Cisco ramps up its efforts in quantum technologies.