Introduction: The Year Quantum Got Real For years, quantum computing has lived in two worlds at once. In research labs, it has been a field of deep physics, delicate hardware, and incremental progress. In headlines, it has often been framed as a looming revolution that would upend cryptography, medicine, and artificial intelligence overnight. In 2026, those two worlds moved closer together. This was the year when several long-running research threads matured at the same time. Hardware became more stable. Control systems became more scalable. Networks moved beyond lab benches into city infrastructure. And algorithmic work began cutting the cost of real quantum computations. Taken together, these breakthroughs did not mean that fully fault-tolerant, million-qubit quantum computers suddenly arrived. But they did mark a clear shift: quantum computing began to look less like a distant scientific ambition and more like an emerging layer of real computing infrastructure. Below are the br...