Peter DeSantis’s Quantum Timeline: What the VivaTech 2026 Prediction Means

Peter DeSantis, the longtime Amazon executive now overseeing the company’s unified AI models, custom silicon, and quantum computing efforts, used his appearance at VivaTech 2026 to deliver a concrete forecast for an industry that has long traded in vague decades-away promises.

Speaking to CNBC on June 17, DeSantis predicted the tech industry will deliver the first “commercially viable” small-scale quantum computers within the next five to seven years . The timeline places the arrival of practical, error-corrected quantum computing somewhere between 2031 and 2033 — a significant narrowing of the window compared to the 15- to 20-year estimates common just a few years ago.

“I genuinely believe that in the next five to seven years, we’ll begin to witness the emergence of the first small-scale quantum computers that are commercially useful,” DeSantis said . The statement matters because it comes from the executive Amazon CEO Andy Jassy tapped in December 2025 to run a new organization combining Amazon’s Nova AI models, its Graviton and Trainium chip programs, and its quantum computing initiatives .

The Two-Track Timeline: 2028 for Fault Tolerance, 2031+ for Commercial Use

DeSantis’s five-to-seven-year window for commercially useful systems is broader than Amazon’s own internal hardware target. Two days before his VivaTech appearance, AWS and QuEra Computing announced a deepened strategic collaboration to bring Libra, a fault-tolerant quantum computer, to the Amazon Braket cloud service starting in 2028 .

Libra is designed as a megaquop-class system — meaning it can perform approximately one million reliable logical quantum operations. QuEra projects the system will deliver over 256 error-corrected logical qubits with a logical error rate of 10⁻⁶ . That level of reliability is widely considered the threshold for running scientifically relevant applications in materials science, quantum chemistry, and high-energy physics — fields where classical simulation breaks down.

The distinction between the two dates is important:

• 2028: Fault-tolerant quantum computing becomes accessible to cloud customers through Amazon Braket via the QuEra Libra partnership. These systems will target scientifically relevant but not yet broadly commercial workloads .
• 2031–2033: DeSantis’s prediction for the first commercially useful small-scale quantum computers, implying broader enterprise utility and potentially economically viable applications .

The gap between the two timelines likely accounts for the engineering work required to take a cloud-hosted fault-tolerant machine and package it into systems that businesses can deploy for practical, repeatable, and cost-effective operations.

The Hardware Foundation: Ocelot and the QuEra Partnership

Amazon’s Ocelot Quantum Chip

While Libra will run on QuEra’s neutral-atom architecture, Amazon has been building its own hardware capability. In February 2025, AWS announced Ocelot, its first-generation quantum computing chip .

Ocelot is built on superconducting quantum circuits and represents what Amazon calls “the first realization of a scalable architecture for bosonic quantum error correction” . The chip’s design integrates error correction directly into the hardware, which AWS claims can reduce the costs of quantum error correction by up to 90% compared to conventional approaches .

Developed at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at Caltech, Ocelot stacks two small silicon microchips and is designed to be hardware-efficient from the ground up . It joins a growing club of early-stage quantum chips from Google, IBM, and Microsoft, signaling that AWS intends to compete on both the hardware and cloud-access fronts.

DeSantis himself identified quantum computing as one of the long-term bets within his newly unified AI-and-chips organization. In early 2026, AWS confirmed it is actively developing the Ocelot chip alongside the Braket cloud service, which already allows customers to experiment with quantum systems from providers including QuEra and Rigetti .

The QuEra Libra Partnership

The Libra announcement adds a near-term delivery vehicle to that strategy. AWS described the expanded QuEra partnership as bringing “the first fault-tolerant quantum computers to the cloud, enabling scientifically relevant applications starting in 2028” .

Libra builds on QuEra’s existing neutral-atom platform, which already includes the 256-qubit Aquila analog system and the Gemini-class machines. The move to fault-tolerant logical qubits — with the one-in-a-million error rates Libra targets — marks a transition from the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era to machines that can run algorithms requiring thousands of error-free operations .

AI Breakthroughs: “A Couple More Orders of Magnitude” Needed

DeSantis balanced his quantum optimism with a candid assessment of AI’s remaining challenges during the same VivaTech conversation.

“The biggest AI breakthroughs are still ahead of us,” he said, adding that today’s dominant transformer architecture “won’t be the last architecture” . In a summary published by Amazon, DeSantis emphasized that future model architectures will need to evolve alongside specialized chips to achieve human-like response speeds and deeper reasoning capabilities .

He estimated that AI needs “a couple more orders of magnitude” of improvement before becoming truly transformative — a reminder that even rapid progress in large language models and multimodal systems has not yet cleared the efficiency and capability hurdles needed for broad societal and economic impact .

This context is important because quantum computing and AI are increasingly intertwined in Amazon’s strategy. DeSantis’s organization was deliberately structured to unify AI models, custom chips, and quantum computing under one leader — a signal that Amazon sees advances in each area enabling progress in the others .

How Amazon’s Timeline Compares to Microsoft’s Quantum Roadmap

DeSantis’s prediction arrives amid an industry-wide acceleration of quantum timelines.

In early June 2026, Microsoft announced it had pulled forward its target for a scalable, commercially useful quantum computer from 2033 to 2029 . The catalyst was Majorana 2, Microsoft’s second-generation topological quantum chip, which the company says is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor .

Microsoft claims the new chip improves qubit coherence time to an average of 20 seconds, a leap that Zulfi Alam, Microsoft’s vice president for quantum, said gives the company confidence it can deploy machines performing calculations classical computers cannot handle by 2029 . “We have halved our timeline,” said Chetan Nayak, the Microsoft technical fellow overseeing quantum hardware .

Here is how the stated targets compare:

Company	Target Year	Description	Key Hardware
Amazon/AWS	2028	Fault-tolerant quantum computing on Amazon Braket via QuEra partnership	QuEra Libra (256+ logical qubits, neutral atoms)
Amazon (DeSantis prediction)	2031–2033	First commercially viable small-scale quantum computers	Not tied to a specific system; broader industry forecast
Microsoft	2029	Scalable, commercially useful quantum computer in Azure data centers	Majorana 2 (topological qubits)

There are important caveats in the comparison. Amazon’s 2028 date through QuEra is a concrete cloud-deployment milestone for fault-tolerant machines aimed at scientific applications, while DeSantis’s five-to-seven-year commercial-usefulness prediction is a broader industry projection. Microsoft’s 2029 target is a single-vendor goal that some critics note has not yet been accompanied by a public demonstration of a fully functional topological qubit .

Industry analysts broadly agree that the deployment window for useful quantum systems is converging. Ellie Brown, an analyst at S&P Market Intelligence, said many industry roadmaps now anticipate deployment of quantum systems between 2028 and 2032 .

The bottom line is that the competitive race to useful quantum computing is now running on a much tighter schedule than even optimistic observers expected two years ago. DeSantis’s remarks at VivaTech 2026, backed by Amazon’s hardware investments and the QuEra partnership, suggest the company intends to be a primary platform for that transition — offering fault-tolerant quantum computing as a cloud service by 2028 and betting that commercial viability follows within a few years after that.