Defence And UK Quantum: Who Buys, Who Builds, And What Has Been Tested

In May 2023 the Royal Navy and Imperial College London tested a quantum accelerometer in a pod aboard XV Patrick Blackett. The pod, one of a set of swap-in bays that QinetiQ designed so devices could come and go, is still the best short picture of UK quantum defence work. At least twelve field tests of quantum hardware with the forces, Dstl or a defence firm have been published since 2023. Yet the ministry has published no order to buy any of it in numbers. What it has bought since 2022 is a photonic computer and a mobile quantum brain scanner, one machine of each. Not every trial reports, either, since Infleqtion’s Q-NAV sea trial, planned for 2025, has no result on the UKRI record and some earlier Navy trials were never published on their own. The established navigation and timing makers in this guide, meanwhile, all have American parents.

The public registers make the point bluntly. The ministry and Dstl publish their contracts on Contracts Finder, the government’s register of public contracts. Search it for the word quantum and for the scanner’s sensors and it holds ten of their awards since 2022, worth about £4.3 million in all. Eight use the word quantum and come to £948,000, while the other two pay for the brain scanner without naming quantum. The largest, £2.8 million to Cerca Magnetics in November 2025, builds that scanner for Defence Medical Services to study the effect of blasts on troops. It reads the brain’s magnetic field with optically pumped magnetometers, a kind of quantum sensor. ORCA’s photonic PT-1 is missing altogether. The ministry has not published what it paid, and the purchase does not appear on Contracts Finder. Find a Tender adds no quantum award, and government guidance says older procurements still report their awards on Contracts Finder. The count is a floor for a simpler reason, since defence contracts can be exempt from publication.

Most of the visible money is research money. It comes from Dstl, from Innovate UK, a council of UK Research and Innovation, from the state’s venture fund and from NATO’s. Even ProQure, the computing competition in the March 2026 package, pays first to build and test machines. Its page says it does not buy any solution. Defence policy now promises to spend more on novel technology, quantum among it, though no policy paper attaches a quantum sum to that promise. The National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ, adds a limit of its own. It has not endorsed quantum key distribution for any government or military use since 2020, which leaves five British key distribution firms without the endorsement a government buyer would look for. Our UK quantum computing and UK quantum sensing guides profile the companies.

The registers show ten quantum awards worth about £4.3 million, and none buys kit in numbers

We searched Contracts Finder on 2 October 2026 for awarded contracts with the word quantum in the notice, published since 1 January 2022, and it returned about 240 notices. Of those, nine were placed by the Ministry of Defence or Dstl. One of them, a computer-network health check, matched the keyword by accident, which leaves eight worth £948,000. The largest is £240,000 to Frazer-Nash in May 2022 for quantum computing applied to sensor management, and the most recent is £60,000 to Aegiq in November 2023 for a report. Not one is for kit in numbers, and the PT-1 computer the ministry bought in 2022 is not among them. Two further awards, £87,000 each from the science department to QinetiQ in December 2024 for road maps of the navigation and sensor missions, are advice rather than defence buying.

A search on the word quantum misses awards that name the device instead. On 11 October 2026 we searched the register again for OPM-MEG, magnetoencephalography and magnetometer. Two more ministry awards came up. Cerca Magnetics won £2.8 million in November 2025, without a competition, to build the scanner in a shipping container, and Birmingham won £550,000 in January 2026 for the study that uses it. Together they match the ministry’s own figure of more than £3 million. A third ministry award, £2.0 million to Birmingham in 2022 for a concussion study, lists brain scans among many tests. It does not say its sensors are quantum, so it is left out. The scanner is the largest quantum item the ministry has published, though it is still one research machine.

Three checks widen the search. A clock order need not use the word quantum, so we re-ran the register for atomic clock, PNT, cold atom, gravimeter and accelerometer. The only extra defence awards were for conventional navigation work, policy advice and aircraft spares. The largest was £1.5 million to Plextek and GMV in August 2022 for what the notice calls alternative navigation data merging. The ministry’s £105,000 to Strathclyde in November 2023 to assess a cold rubidium atomic clock was already in the quantum set. Since 24 February 2025 new public contracts have been published on Find a Tender under the Procurement Act 2023. So we pulled every notice at the award stage on that register from that date to 1 October 2026, about 25,000 notice releases in all. We searched them for the same terms as whole words. About 330 of the notice releases, covering about 320 procurements, name the Ministry of Defence, Dstl or one of the services as buyer. A further 17 notices from buyers of every kind contain the word quantum, most of them in the old sense of an amount of money in contract wording. Among them is a closed-cycle helium cryogenic system for Heriot-Watt University. Not one of them is a quantum award with a defence buyer. Every fetch that failed on the register’s rate limit was retried until it succeeded, so no day is missing. Work bought under a long-term deal with a prime such as QinetiQ would carry the prime’s name rather than the word quantum. Defence and security contracts can also be exempt from publication altogether.

So the registers understate what the ministry spends. The ministry says it has invested more than £28 million through Dstl in quantum research and development, but with no window or definition the figure cannot be set against the register total. In September 2026 a minister told Parliament the department holds no single figure for quantum investment. The eight awards that name quantum stop in November 2023. Dstl has backed trials since, so a search on one word misses work that is still going on. No contract to buy quantum clocks, sensors or computers in numbers has been published, and no company has announced one. A published order would prove this guide wrong.

The ministry now also contracts small firms directly. In May 2026 Aquark was one of thirteen firms given Commercial X contracts through the ministry’s fast-track buying route, and the release lists quantum sensing among the areas. It says the largest of the thirteen is worth £4 million. Neither the ministry nor Aquark has published the value of Aquark’s contract.

No trial we found has published a measured drift or accuracy figure

The clock came first because the weakness is real. Satellite signals can be jammed or faked, and a 2023 study for the government put the cost to the country of a 24-hour loss of them at £1.42 billion. In January 2025 Dstl announced an optical atomic clock that the ministry calls the first of its kind built in Britain and the first it had tested outside a laboratory. It said the clock would lose less than a second over billions of years. That is the only precision figure any trial in this guide has published, and it is the ministry’s claim rather than a drift measured against a reference clock. Its partners were Infleqtion UK, Aquark Technologies, HCD Research and Imperial College London. The prototypes were tested with the Navy’s chief technology office and the Army’s Futures team at the BattleLab, and the ministry said the clock could be on operations within five years.

Dstl went back to the field in February 2026, and it reported a trial in which clock makers tested parts and whole devices unattended, in conditions a laboratory cannot copy. No figure for drift, or for how long a clock holds time on its own, was published. Far Field Exploits, a small firm started by veterans, used Dstl’s kit and expertise to refine a wireless time-transfer system for atomic clocks that it could not have tested alone. A further trial is planned for 2027. Dstl says it will reach beyond clocks to wider military problems, and the stated goal is a quantum navigation system, clocks included, on an aircraft by 2030.

Aquark of Hampshire has two sea trials, one drone flight and one networked radar trial on the public record. Aboard HMS Pursuer in 2024, Aquark and the Royal Navy said, its cold-atom system held atoms through every test and at every spot on the boat. The main area flagged for further engineering was magnetic shielding. In June 2025 it went back aboard Pursuer with the AQlock clock itself, with Dstl lending test equipment and expertise, and said the clock gave stable outputs at sea. It published no drift figure. In June 2026 it placed two AQlock 2.0 units at separate sites, as we reported, and they reached a usable timing signal from cold in under 30 minutes. The clocks then kept two radars, a Saab Giraffe 1X among them, on one shared air picture with no satellite timing, with Dstl and the Navy’s XV Patrick Blackett acting as rebroadcast nodes. The work began in December 2025. Two working prototypes existed by the end of June, and Aquark called it the first known use of a pair of British-built cold-atom systems on a real defence problem. The 30 minutes is a set-up time, not a drift figure.

The other clock at sea is Infleqtion’s. In October 2025 its Tiqker clock ran aboard Excalibur, the Navy’s test submarine with no crew. The ministry says a team from the Submarine Delivery Agency ran the trial with MSubs, Infleqtion and the Navy, and that it came six months early. Commander Matthew Steele of the Navy’s new-technology office called it a first step to using quantum clocks on long trips under the sea. A submarine cannot lean on satellite timing. Infleqtion said the clock matches a national laboratory time reference and that tests against better standards will follow. It gave no measured figure either.

We searched the newsrooms of Aquark and Infleqtion, the news pages of the Royal Navy and Imperial, and Dstl’s gov.uk items on 2 October 2026 for trial announcements since 2022. On 11 October we added trials named in government releases and in the Navy’s December 2025 report. Third-party reports were traced to their releases where we could. The Dstl search covered its 30 newest items, and makers other than Aquark and Infleqtion were not swept. The Navy refers to earlier trials on its roll-on roll-off fleet and in its quantum pod, but we found no separate publication of them, so the timeline below is a floor.

Quantum navigation has flown on a test jet and sailed with the Navy, and Q-NAV’s sea trial has no reported result

The national missions are plain about this one. Quantum navigation systems, “including clocks”, are to be on aircraft by 2030, and mobile networked quantum sensors are to be in use across transport, telecoms, energy and defence by the same year. The Navy started early, with the pod trial at the top of this guide. In May 2023 NavyX and Imperial College London tested a quantum accelerometer aboard XV Patrick Blackett, as we reported. The sensor uses cold atoms to measure a change in speed, and it is the kind of instrument that could one day replace a satellite fix. It rode in a Navy pod, one of a set of swap-in bays that QinetiQ designed. Commander Michael Hutchinson, the ship’s captain, said the technology was “still in its very early stages”. In December 2025 a revised version sailed to the Arctic with the Navy. The Navy’s report adds that a University of Sussex magnetometer was tested in summer 2025 on one of its survey craft, though neither trial gave an accuracy figure.

Quantum navigation has also flown. In May 2024 Infleqtion flew its Tiqker clock and a cold-atom unit on QinetiQ’s RJ100 test jet from MoD Boscombe Down, with BAE Systems and QinetiQ as partners, as we reported. The government said it had backed the work with nearly £8 million. That money came through UK Research and Innovation, so it is government spending, and it was not a defence order. A BAE engineer said the work could ultimately offer “a significant military advantage”. No accuracy figure was published.

One navigation trial still has no result. Infleqtion UK led Q-NAV, a £3.5 million Small Business Research Initiative contract. Innovate UK paid for it and it ran with QinetiQ and the Royal Navy, so it was public money for research rather than an order. It aimed to combine classical and quantum inertial sensors into one system that holds a course when satellite signals are lost. Q-NAV alone, paid by Innovate UK inside UK Research and Innovation, is worth about four-fifths of all ten ministry and Dstl quantum awards combined. Infleqtion announced in August 2024 that the first phase was complete, ending with an industry day on 27 June. It said a sea trial on the Patrick Blackett would follow in early 2025, as we reported.

In February 2025 Infleqtion said on LinkedIn that it would put a container lab aboard a military cargo ship for a voyage of several days. More than two years after Q-NAV’s first phase, no result from either plan has been published. We searched Infleqtion’s newsroom, the Royal Navy’s news pages and the project’s UKRI record on 2 October 2026, and the record lists the project as closed with no outcome posted. A follow-on, QNAV2, began in March 2025 with £465,000 from Innovate UK. Quantum Technologies Associates leads it, with Infleqtion and QinetiQ as partners.

Q-NAV was one of six Innovate UK navigation and timing contracts worth more than £3 million each that started in 2023, and it was not the largest. Infleqtion’s own ORACL clock contract was £4.99 million. HARLEQUIN, a navigation system led by TMD Technologies of Hayes, was £4.75 million. CPI of the United States bought TMD in 2021, and since September 2024 Transdigm Microwave Limited has been the controller. Silurum, a quantum gyroscope led by Microchip Technology Caldicot, was £3.53 million, and its parent is Microchip Technology of Arizona. Aquark’s own AQlock contract was £3.43 million. Nascent Semiconductor’s QS-EXACT, for a new kind of clock, was £3.05 million. So three American-owned firms led four of the six, since Infleqtion led two.

CPI TMD took HARLEQUIN to sea in December 2025. The system sailed on Trinity House’s THV Galatea with Strathclyde and Imperial, as Innovate UK research rather than a Royal Navy trial, and a second trial is planned for the end of 2026.

The name on the share list changed before that trial. In February 2024 Britain let TransDigm buy CPI’s British units, and atomic clock research and making had to stay in the country under the terms of the sale.

The pattern is older than 2023. Teledyne UK of Chelmsford, owned by Teledyne Technologies of the US, led KAIROS, a £4.45 million project from 2018 to 2021 to build a miniature atomic clock. It also led CASPA, a cold-atom payload for space, and Gravity Platform, which tested quantum gravity sensors for finding buried assets and structures. All of these are research contracts, not orders.

Infleqtion’s parent is American, and it sells to the Pentagon. It took a $2 million US Army award in December 2025 and a $1 million US Navy deal in April 2026, both for machine-learning software rather than quantum hardware. Its British arm has built in Oxford since 2014 and led both Q-NAV and ORACL. In 2026 it began a Quantum Innovation Centre at its Oxford site to add research, factory and integration space. It says Britain’s next autonomous systems will depend on trusted navigation, timing and sensing rather than on the platforms alone.

Two British firms build the other parts of a fix with no satellite. Delta g of Birmingham builds gravity sensors that map what lies underground, and its own site names navigation as a use its design can grow into. It is on the state security fund’s portfolio. Zero Point Motion of Bristol builds motion sensors on a chip. Innovate UK opened a contest for up to £14.3 million for quantum sensing and navigation projects in August 2026, with defence named among the sectors, as we reported.

Winners were named on 13 October 2026. A government release says £50 million will go through the sensing and navigation contest that Innovate UK opened in August, and UK Research and Innovation will pay the money out. ColdQuanta UK was named for a small quantum radio that can be moved, with defence and civilian uses. Cerca Magnetics was named for a wearable brain scanner for epilepsy care, a different award from the ministry’s scanner. The same release puts £20 million into quantum networking and £8 million into the QuEST apprentices programme. The contest page still caps the sensing awards at £14.3 million, and no firm was given its own share of the £50 million.

The MoD bought a photonic machine in 2022 and QinetiQ has since run a defence problem on OQC’s Toshiko

The Ministry of Defence bought ORCA Computing’s PT-1, as Dstl’s own 2022 review confirms, and the purchase was announced in June 2022. ORCA and the BBC called it the government’s first quantum computer. The ministry has not published what it paid, and the purchase does not appear on Contracts Finder. It computes with photons, particles of light. ORCA says it works at room temperature rather than in a fridge. The ministry said it would use it to try quantum tools in defence, while ORCA pitches it for machine-learning jobs such as reading images. What the register does show is a Dstl award of £140,000 to PA Consulting in May 2022, for quantum computing to speed up operations, through the Defence and Security Accelerator. The register also shows £150,000 to QinetiQ that October for quantum computing applied to surveillance.

QinetiQ is the integrator. It fits other people’s devices into a system the forces can use. In 2023 it joined Infleqtion, which led both bids, on two Innovate UK projects. QECCO is a general study of optimisation problems, not a defence one, while Q-CALC, with QinetiQ as partner, is aimed at quantum machine learning on defence data. In February 2026 OQC announced that QinetiQ had run its own algorithm on Toshiko, as we reported. It looked for the nodes whose loss would do most harm to a mobile ad-hoc network, which is a radio net with no fixed masts of the kind troops use in the field. Gerald Mullally, OQC’s chief executive, called it “a tangible example of quantum computing’s power to deliver real operational value”. OQC’s own case study is more cautious. It says the networks tested were still small enough to solve on a normal computer, and that errors appeared above about 20 nodes.

In September 2026 the two firms reported a second result, which we covered. A pipeline that sends only the hard-to-read radar pulses to a quantum model beat an Alan Turing Institute benchmark, OQC says, at sorting pulses by the radar that sent them. The run was on a simulator, and OQC says so. Dstl once expected faster progress. In 2020 it said a first quantum computing capability could be in service by 2025 if tests bore it out. None has been announced.

The NCSC puts post-quantum software first and does not endorse quantum key distribution for government use

The National Cyber Security Centre sets the rules, and its first concern is post-quantum cryptography, the set of new algorithms designed to resist attack by a quantum computer. The centre’s timeline for the move to it, published in March 2025, wants a plan by 2028, the urgent systems moved by 2031 and all of them by 2035. In a white paper dated March 2020, which we revisited in August 2025, the centre says it does not endorse quantum key distribution for any government or military use. The method does not prove who is on the line, and it rests on hardware that is hard to vouch for. A non-endorsement is advice rather than a ban. Neither contract register shows an order to use key distribution on government or military traffic, though both can omit exempt defence contracts. The notices on Contracts Finder that name it are research test beds, such as the satellite demonstrations bought for York’s quantum hub and for the business department’s SPEQTRE project. We ran that search on 11 October 2026.

That rule has a cost. Five British firms build key distribution hardware or its parts, KETS, Xen Quantum, Photarix, Lumino Technologies and Craft Prospect, and the computing guide names them. None of the five names a government order for use on its own site, which we checked on 2 October 2026. KETS names a research contract from Innovate UK. Three of them, Xen Quantum, Photarix and Lumino, were incorporated after the advice was given, and two, KETS and Craft Prospect, were incorporated before it, their Companies House records show.

The NCSC’s directory of assured consultancies, filtered for its post-quantum pilot, lists eight firms it trusts to plan the move, each checked against its standard. We reported the list in September 2025. They are Arqit, CGI IT UK, Avella Security, Cambridge Consultants, Capgemini, Frazer-Nash Consultancy, IBM and PQShield, and the pilot runs to 31 March 2027. Two of them are British firms built around products, not advice. PQShield of Oxford sells the code and chip blocks that put the new maths into hardware, and Arqit, listed on Nasdaq, sells software that lets two parties agree a key without a quantum link.

Arqit’s defence work is the easiest to see. Babcock and Arqit signed a collaboration agreement in August 2021. In December 2023 Babcock showed SwarmCore, drone-control software built with Arqit’s key agreement, at the ministry’s BattleLab. At the DVD 2026 show the two firms say they moved data securely from Millbrook to a mortar system at another site, with no encryption box in the line. Babcock says its layered network can carry such links over 4G and 5G, Wi-Fi, satellite and tactical radio. On 6 October 2026 Arqit said it had signed a NATO secure-networking contract inside a winning consortium. The term is one year with two options to renew, and the company published no price.

SECQAI of London, which the ministry named in the first cohort of NATO’s DIANA scheme in 2023, taped out a quantum-resistant chip with TSMC in November 2025. Cavero Secure of Leeds is showing post-quantum software for small devices. Crypto Quantique of London says it gives each chip an identity drawn from the way electrons tunnel through plain silicon. Dstl’s one published post-quantum award went elsewhere. It paid Platipus £155,000 in August 2022 for codes that can be swapped out.

The primes test and integrate, and QinetiQ, BAE and MBDA all have British quantum trials on the record

QinetiQ of Farnborough is named in eight of the thirty-two timeline entries below, more than any other prime, though it invented none of the devices in them. It designed the Navy pods, one of which carried the Imperial sensor. In 2024 it flew Infleqtion’s kit on its own test jet. It co-ran Q-NAV and is a partner in QNAV2. It wrote the algorithm that ran on Toshiko and lent a radar site for the June 2026 trial. It also holds one of the ministry’s published quantum awards, and it won two of the science department’s contracts to draw up road maps for the missions.

BAE Systems works in Britain as a partner. It was a partner in the May 2024 Boscombe Down trial and in High-BIAS2, the Innovate UK research behind it. In late 2024 it joined Digital Catapult’s quantum programme. There it worked with ORCA on routing aircraft around threat zones. It is also a partner in the national navigation hub. Its best-documented lab work is at FAST Labs in Merrimack, New Hampshire. That lab signed a three-year agreement with the US Air Force Research Laboratory in September 2025, building on radio sensors made from Rydberg atoms, which are atoms puffed up to sense fields.

MBDA’s British arm has done more than invest. In October 2023 it partnered Aquark in drone trials of its cold-atom system, co-funded by Innovate UK, and from 2022 to 2025 it was a partner in a rubidium clock project. With ORCA it worked on missile flight paths. It also put money into Aquark’s seed round. MBDA itself is an alliance of Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo.

Saab UK, the Swedish group’s British arm, supplied the Giraffe 1X radar and a site for it in Aquark’s trial. Leonardo is a partner in the navigation hub. PA Consulting, which holds the May 2022 Dstl award, has been wholly owned by the American engineering group Jacobs since March 2026, when Jacobs bought the rest. Frazer-Nash, which holds the largest Dstl award that names quantum, is on the NCSC directory as well.

The money is research money, and policy promises buying with no quantum sum attached

Very little defence money in British quantum buys kit. The ministry has paid only for single machines, the PT-1 in 2022 and the Cerca scanner in 2025. Innovate UK paid for the defence-framed research on the UKRI record, giving £3.5 million for Q-NAV and £115,000 for Q-CALC as Small Business Research Initiative contracts. It also gave £253,000 for QECCO, a general optimisation study, as a grant that the firms part-funded. Innovate UK is part of UK Research and Innovation, so this is public money. It buys research rather than kit.

The state also has its own venture fund, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund, set up in 2018. Quantum is one of its four themes. Its published list holds seven quantum firms, Delta g, Nu Quantum, ORCA Computing, Photonic, PsiQuantum, Quantum Motion and Riverlane, and it also lists Optalysys, which computes with light. Two of the seven are foreign, Photonic in Canada and PsiQuantum in California. Three of the five British ones are in this guide. ORCA sold the ministry the PT-1. Delta g builds gravity sensors, and Riverlane sells error correction.

Defence policy now names quantum as something to buy, though no sum is set for it. From 2026, says the Defence Industrial Strategy of September 2025, at least 10% of what the ministry spends buying equipment will go on novel technologies, quantum among them. The Defence Investment Plan of June 2026 gives UK Defence Innovation, the ministry’s innovation arm, £1.6 billion over four years. It says that includes “embedding and expanding AI and quantum across the Armed Forces”.

NATO’s money arrived in 2024. The NATO Innovation Fund, a venture fund backed by 24 allies, led Aquark’s €5 million seed in September 2024, with EIFO, UKI2S and MBDA investing alongside it. The fund says Aquark was the first firm from NATO’s DIANA scheme for start-ups to get money straight from it. In October 2024 Mandy Birch, a US Air Force reservist, raised more than $5 million for TreQ, her Oxfordshire computer builder. TreQ’s own release and Sky News record it. Lavrock Ventures, a US venture firm focused on national security, led the round.

British firms also take American defence research money. Oxford Ionics and Quantum Motion entered the first stage of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative in April 2025, and Quantum Motion is now in the second stage, where awards run to $15 million. Riverlane works on three of the teams. IonQ said on 17 September 2025 that it had completed the purchase of Oxford Ionics, and the firm gave no price for the deal in that announcement.

Research money also comes through EPSRC. In March 2024 Southampton said that around £32 million from government, industry and small firms would pay for two new centres to train PhD students. One trains quantum engineers, with £18 million from EPSRC and backing from Microsoft, QinetiQ, Riverlane and Oxford Ionics. The other, a £12.5 million centre for defence and security systems, gets money from EPSRC, the Ministry of Defence and industry. The ministry’s share is not stated.

Dstl says it has co-invested with EPSRC in quantum hubs. The national navigation hub, QEPNT, is led by Glasgow and has £21.9 million from EPSRC to 2029, with the Royal Navy, BAE Systems, MBDA, Thales UK and Leonardo among its partners. The Atomic Weapons Establishment opened a quantum centre with Strathclyde in November 2025. It will use sensing to check the condition of components and computing to model materials.

NATO and AUKUS aim quantum at navigation and submarines, the ground Britain’s 2030 missions cover

NATO’s foreign ministers approved the alliance’s first quantum strategy on 28 November 2023. A summary came out in January 2024, which we reported. It names the uses as sensing, imaging, position and timing, finding submarines, and codes built to resist a quantum computer. Britain’s five missions came out on 22 November 2023, six days before the NATO vote, and two of them carry 2030 dates that bear on defence. Quantum navigation is to be on aircraft by 2030, and mobile quantum sensors on networks are to be in use in defence by then too. Computing and networks got 2035.

Britain also works on quantum with Australia and the United States. Their quantum pact, set up in April 2022, began with navigation and timing, and in December 2023 the three defence ministers added stealth under the sea, for the new SSN-AUKUS submarine among others. A minister told Parliament the partners joined quantum clock trials in June 2025, but did not say which. Excalibur, which later carried Infleqtion’s clock, also took part in an AUKUS exercise that year. No result from the AUKUS trials has been published.

Quantum now sits with a minister at the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, in post since July 2026. The ministry says it is working with that department on quantum computing for defence. Three fixed points remain. They are Dstl’s planned 2027 trial, the navigation hub’s 2029 end date and the 2030 aircraft date. Everything else in this guide is a trial waiting on a buyer, with no published order for the kit on Contracts Finder or Find a Tender.

The ministry’s quantum record since 2022 is trials, grants and single machines, with no production order

The entries run from May 2022 to October 2026, and they are trials, grants, contracts, rules, policy papers, one chip tape-out, one completed acquisition and two demonstrations of secure links. Each row links the original announcement where one is public, with the Quantum Zeitgeist report beside it. Paired rows say which link is which.

Three American-owned firms led four of the six largest navigation and timing contracts of 2023

The table holds 31 of the organisations named above, with the part each played and a dated event where the reporting gives one. All 17 makers in it are run from Britain, by their Companies House records or their own sites. That tells you where they work. It says nothing about who owns the shares. Four of them have American parents, Infleqtion UK, TMD Technologies, Microchip Technology Caldicot and Teledyne UK, and they are the established navigation and timing makers. The British-owned makers are younger firms such as Aquark, Delta g and Zero Point Motion, and Arqit, for one, is listed in New York. PA Consulting is American-owned and Saab UK is Swedish.

What a Navy trial is worth to a supplier, a prime and an investor

For a supplier the lesson is uncomfortable. A Navy trial gives a firm a reference to show other buyers, and a firm counting on ministry revenue should plan on Dstl research work and Innovate UK research contracts. A prime choosing quantum partners should read the NCSC position before it signs with a key-distribution firm. Neither register shows a government order to use the method, though exempt defence contracts would not appear there. An investor reading defence as the route to market has three and a half years of trials and no published order to go on.

One document would change all three readings. It is a ministry contract for production clocks, sensors or computers, published beside the awards that make up today’s record. None has been published, and the 2027 Dstl trial, the hub’s 2029 end date and the 2030 aircraft date are the next points at which one could appear. Until then the pod on the Patrick Blackett remains the right picture, a bay that other people’s devices pass through.