Quantum Computing Emulation updated (2026)
I estimate that the active global DRAM stock in 2026 is roughly 180 to 230 EB (exabytes), while total global computing capacity is approximately 6.4×10^16 MIPS.
The entire world’s computing infrastructure could therefore emulate a 63-qubit quantum computer as a complete state vector, without quantum hardware errors or truncating the state space.
Scaling from the 2024 estimate of 21 kHz for 48 qubits, and allowing for the roughly 2.28-fold increase in computing capacity and the 2^15 increase in state size, the effective emulated clock rate would be approximately 1.5 Hz.
The effective rate at which the classical emulator could execute quantum-state update steps is the ‘clock rate’ or the effective full-state update rate. For a full-state emulator, each quantum gate requires calculations across some or all of the amplitudes in the state vector.
The entire world’s computing power could emulate a 63-qubit fully entangled quantum computer, representing 2^63, equivalent to roughly 14 quintillion complex amplitude additions per second, plus about 28 quintillion complex multiplications per second, at an effective rate of roughly 1.5 full-state gate operations per second.
Despite using essentially the entire world’s RAM and computing capacity, this gains only about 15 qubits over the 48-qubit 2024 case because the required classical resources double with every additional qubit.
