When Breakthrough Energy Ventures announced a new investment in quantum computing last month, it raised some eyebrows. Did the addition really fit into the firm’s focus on clean energy and climate tech, certain observers wonder, or might it be stretching the definition a bit?
Breakthrough led the $105 million Series A funding round of Sygaldry Technologies, a startup building quantum computers with the goal of making artificial intelligence models faster and more efficient. Other investors included Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, Rock Yard Ventures, and Earth Venture Capital; the last is the only other one with a decarbonization mandate driving its investments.
Sygaldry isn’t the first time Breakthrough Energy invests in quantum computing. In 2021, the firm participated in the $350 million private investment in public equity (or PIPE) funding round for IonQ, a hardware and software quantum computing developer.
But this latest commitment, coming at a time when rapidly increasing load growth from data centers and AI is threatening the reliability of energy systems across the world, is putting a spotlight on quantum computing’s energy-saving potential.
In an emailed statement to Latitude Media, Carmichael Roberts, managing partner at Breakthrough Energy, said that part of the rationale behind the investment comes from the fact that large language models’ energy intensity is becoming unsustainable. “We believe new computing platforms such as quantum computing have the potential to break this paradigm,” he wrote.
Traditional computing relies on classical physics to process information via a binary code system made of ones and zeroes. Quantum computing, however, relies instead on quantum mechanics, using units called “qubits,” which “can exist in multiple states at the same time” through “quantum states,” per Microsoft’s definition: “This structure allows teams to explore complex problems in new ways, especially when traditional approaches are too slow or impractical.”
The technology for decades was used primarily in university and research lab context. But as it gains more widespread momentum, part of quantum computing’s promise is a superior processing power that also makes it more energy efficient.
As Mark Cupta, managing director at Prelude Ventures, notes, that’s a key reason why quantum computing has long been considered by investors, including Breakthrough Energy and Prelude itself, a climate investment.
“The beauty of a quantum computer is that it will be up to many orders of magnitude more energy efficient,” Cupta said. “There are some problems that a quantum computer can solve that all the computers on Earth could not accomplish in any relevant human timescale. In those cases, you’ve got an effectively incalculable energy savings.”
Prelude has been invested in quantum computing since 2018, when it first backed the then-brand-new Atom Computing, a hardware platform developing large-scale quantum computers. At the time, Cupta, who led the investment, was already concerned about how energy demand from data center computing was starting to outpace normal load growth.
“AI has lit multiple fires underneath that theme,” Cupta said. “And that’s because of the energy intensity of the brute force mathematical methodology used in today’s AI models.”
That urgency comes as quantum technology is reaching what an April 2026 report by McKinsey calls a “commercial tipping point.” According to the report, over 300 companies globally have started adopting some level of quantum computing, and investors have been paying more attention, with investment in quantum technology startups reaching $12.6 billion in 2025, more than six times higher than the previous year.
Beyond energy efficiency
Of course, quantum is attractive to a wide range of investors, often with deeper pockets than those specializing in climate tech.
But for those climate investors choosing to put money in the technology, the reasoning can go beyond its potential energy savings. For one, the fact that quantum computers can potentially explore a large number of possibilities at once, rather than testing every solution to a problem one by one, can help with complex optimization challenges, such as how to best operate the grid or a supply chain. And because quantum essentially behaves like the molecules in nature, it’s uniquely suited to simulate the physical world and find the best materials for a variety of applications.
“We would be able to find the most ideal carbon capture substrate, or the catalyst that uses the least amount of energy to make chemicals like fertilizer, or simulate and discover world-changing materials like a room temperature superconductor,” Cupta said, adding that a “significant amount of what we invest in could benefit from the existence of a quantum computer to help accelerate speed to market.”
These are what Morgan Sheil, chief climate officer at the World Fund, a European climate-focused VC investor, calls the “indirect” climate impacts of quantum computing, beyond its energy efficiency benefits.
“There’s a massive number of use cases that can be unlocked by compute in terms of reducing emissions and optimizing, given that there are a lot of systems that are not particularly optimized or particularly smart,” she said.
The World Fund has been investing in quantum computing since 2022, when it led the 128 million-euro (roughly $133 million at the time) Series A funding round for IQM Quantum Computers, a European hardware and software platform. At the time, the World Fund was investing in technologies with the potential to reduce emissions by 100 megatons per year by 2040, and part of the IQM assessment was how impactful its technology could be for batteries and energy storage.
Per the assessment, the startup’s technology could not only help better integrate storage systems into the grid, but also help replace lithium-ion batteries with lithium-sulfur batteries, lowering costs, encouraging adoption, and improving batteries’ energy density. (In 2024, IQM announced it was collaborating with German automaker Volkswagen to use quantum computing to simulate battery chemistry and look for a more efficient battery design.)
“Even if it impacted 1% to 5% of the total emissions in a battery market, that would be significant,” she said.
Of course, like many of the new technologies climate tech funds invest in, quantum computing is not commercially available at scale yet, and its potential to impact even a small slice of the market by 2040 remains to be seen.
But Sheil is optimistic, and has a growing body of research to back up that enthusiasm. According to McKinsey, 72% of quantum computing use is now by companies in the private sector, a suggestion that the technology is stretching beyond the province of universities and research labs and starting to reach a broader market.
