No industry-standard benchmark exists for comparing quantum computers, making procurement decisions nearly impossible

Quantum Volume, the most widely cited benchmark for quantum computer performance, cannot scale beyond approximately 100 qubits because it requires exponentially expensive classical simulation for verification. IBM stopped reporting Quantum Volume for its largest processors. Alternative metrics like EPLG (error per layered gate) and CLOPS (circuit layer operations per second) each capture only one dimension of performance. There is no agreed-upon, comprehensive benchmark, so a CTO evaluating whether to lease time on IBM, Google, IonQ, or Quantinuum hardware has no apples-to-apples comparison available. Why it matters: Because there is no standard benchmark, enterprise customers cannot rationally evaluate quantum hardware for their specific workloads, so procurement decisions are based on marketing claims and vendor relationships rather than measured performance, so enterprises either overpay for hardware that does not fit their use case or avoid quantum computing entirely due to uncertainty, so the commercial quantum computing market grows far more slowly than the technology's potential warrants, so quantum hardware companies cannot get the customer revenue they need to fund continued R&D and must rely on increasingly skeptical venture capital. The structural root cause is that quantum computing platforms differ so fundamentally in their architecture (superconducting vs. trapped ion vs. photonic vs. neutral atom) that no single metric can fairly compare them. Quantum Volume favors high-connectivity systems, gate fidelity favors trapped ions, qubit count favors superconducting, and speed favors photonic. Each vendor promotes the metric where they win. International standardization bodies like ISO and IEEE have working groups, but they have explicitly stated that many benchmarking techniques are 'still significantly evolving' and standardization would be premature.