Niccolo De Masi Warns Quantum Computing Could Break RSA by 2035
Quantum computing is moving from theory to a schedule that security teams have to plan around. Niccolo De Masi said in January that Q-day may arrive within a few years. That is the point when a cryptographically relevant machine could break the systems protecting data today.
Niccolo De Masi and Q-day
De Masi, chairman and CEO of IonQ, said: "People assume the Q-day was happening in 2040, I think it is going to arrive like a freight train by the end of the current US administration." That warning gives security planners a shorter runway than the casual 2040 assumption and forces them to treat migration as a live project, not a future exercise.
Q-day is the moment when a cryptographically relevant quantum computer becomes capable of breaking the security mechanisms currently protecting systems and data from cyberattacks. Palo Alto Networks said that would not collapse the internet, but it said RSA and ECC could become vulnerable and that public key infrastructures, certificate authorities and digital identities would need to be replaced immediately.
100,000 qubits and RSA
In February, Iceberg Quantum published an arXiv.org paper saying a quantum computer with about 100,000 qubits can break RSA encryption within a week. That is the most concrete break estimate in the facts here, and it turns the threat from a vague future risk into an engineering target that defenders can model against.
In March, Google Quantum AI published a paper saying the cryptography protecting major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, can be defeated with a quantum computer with 500,000 physical qubits within minutes. That widens the concern beyond enterprise login systems and into assets that depend on public-key trust, while still leaving a large gap between research milestones and a working attack machine.
2035 migration targets
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre are targeting complete PQC migration by 2035. That timeline gives organizations a hard deadline, but it also shows why the transition is already underway: the agencies are asking for post-quantum cryptography adoption before Q-day arrives.
IBM plans to build a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. The Potomac Officers Club will also bring government, industry and academic experts together at its 2026 Cyber Summit on May 21, which shows the issue has moved into formal planning rather than abstract warning.
The unresolved question is when a cryptographically relevant machine will actually appear, because the timeline depends on breakthroughs in building one. Until then, organizations that still rely on RSA, ECC and older public-key systems have to replace them before the clock on Q-day starts running in real life.
