Quantum chemistry at QCE26 chased a shrinking knot

This guide follows 33 quantum chemistry and life-science talks at IEEE Quantum Week 2026 in Toronto. In most of them the quantum share of the problem was small, and getting smaller. On the Monday morning of IEEE Quantum Week 2026, Alán Aspuru-Guzik of NVIDIA and the University of Toronto opened a simulation workshop by framing quantum chemistry as a race. On one side stood today’s quantum machines. On the other stood the classical ones, which keep getting better at it. Aspuru-Guzik co-wrote the 2014 paper that gave quantum chemistry VQE, the method much of today’s chip-based chemistry builds on. Yet in Toronto the same scientist showed an AI model that does the work of a top classical method. It handled a chain of 100 carbon atoms in two minutes. Quantum chemistry is the oldest promise of quantum computing. Molecules are held together by electrons that obey quantum rules. To track them all exactly, an ordinary computer needs twice the memory for each new slot an electron can sit in. In the early 1980s Richard Feynman proposed modelling one quantum system with another. Classical chemistry has not stood still since. Cheap methods handle most everyday molecules. Coupled cluster, the method chemists…