In 2019 the reference estimate for breaking RSA-2048 was 20 million noisy qubits running for eight hours. In March 2026 a Caltech and Oratomic team put the figure at 10,000. That is a factor of two thousand in seven years, and not one step of it came from new hardware.
Why it matters
The threat to RSA is advancing through mathematics rather than through hardware, which means the timeline can move without a single new qubit being built. That is why the United States has attached dates to the migration while no machine capable of the attack exists.
