Quantum computing news usually picks up near the end of the year, as companies try to provide evidence that they are hitting benchmarks on time. However, there have been interesting announcements as the summer starts this year, from incremental progress to attention-grabbing promises. As we did earlier this month, Ars has a rundown of some of the most significant announcements.

These include a promise of useful, error-corrected quantum computing as soon as 2028, details on an updated trapped ion processor, and a case in which claims of quantum supremacy have been cut back a bit thanks to advances in more traditional algorithms.

2028 is remarkably soon

Many people in the field expect that useful quantum computers are still about five to 10 years away. While there may be a few useful algorithms that can be run on existing error-prone hardware, almost all of the interesting problems that quantum computing can be applied to will require some form of error correction enabled by linking a small collection of hardware qubits together into what's called a logical qubit. Logical qubits include the redundant storage of information along with neighboring qubits that can be measured to determine when errors occur and how to fix them.

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Amazon now has hundreds of flight-ready satellites standing idle in Florida, waiting to join the company's low-Earth orbit Internet constellation, an Amazon official said Tuesday.

"They're built, and sitting in a payload processing facility waiting for trips to orbit," said Steve Metayer, vice president of Amazon Leo Production Operations, during a teleconference with reporters. "And we're currently manufacturing several satellites a day."

Metayer spoke on the eve of the company's next mission, during which an Ariane 64 rocket will launch three dozen Amazon Leo satellites into orbit from a spaceport in French Guiana. Liftoff is targeted for 7:53 am ET (11:53 UTC) on Wednesday.

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If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you've probably stumbled on plenty of memes and posts premised on data centers' insatiable thirst for water to power evaporative cooling. But a new report from Amazon highlights just how little water all these AI data centers are using in aggregate, on a relative basis, even as individual data centers can strain local water supplies.

In a Thursday blog post, Amazon claims its data centers withdrew "about 2.5 billion gallons" globally in 2025. That number sounds incredibly large at first glance, but it looks downright puny compared to the 117 trillion gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015. It's also useful to compare Amazon's number to stats from more water-intensive areas, from the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually on US lawns and landscaping to the 1.3 trillion gallons a year used in California almond orchards to the 531 billion gallons a year used just for US golf courses.

Amazon is just one company, of course, and a relative latecomer to reporting its data center water usage numbers. Google data centers withdrew about more than 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2024, on top of about 2.75 billion gallons from Microsoft and about 1.4 billion gallons from Meta in the same year.

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The Federal Communications Commission has waived a requirement for Amazon to launch half of its satellite broadband constellation by the end of July, a key regulatory reprieve that buys the tech giant time to get more of its spacecraft into orbit.

Amazon won regulatory approval for the Amazon Leo network in July 2020. The FCC's authorization came with two deadlines. First, Amazon had to launch half of its 3,232 satellites by July 30, 2026, in order to maintain authorization to launch the rest of the network. The regulator gave Amazon a deadline of July 30, 2029, to have all of its first-generation satellites in orbit.

It has been apparent for some time that Amazon would not meet the FCC's requirement to launch half of its satellites—1,616 spacecraft—by the end of next month. Amazon filed an application in January requesting the FCC extend the deadline to July 2028 or waive it altogether. The commission decided on the latter option, removing any time limit for the 50 percent deployment milestone, but keeping the July 2029 deadline in place for the entire constellation.

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