National security
The encryption deadline is already running.
Two parts of this are immediate: cryptography that must be replaced on a published federal schedule, and which country ends up owning the hardware.
Harvest now, decrypt later
An adversary does not need a working cryptanalytic quantum computer today to benefit from one in fifteen years. It only needs to copy encrypted traffic now and store it. Diplomatic cable, weapons programme data, grid telemetry, health records, seismic survey: anything with a secrecy lifetime longer than the migration window is already exposed, whatever its encryption says today.
That makes post-quantum cryptography an operations problem with a due date, and the United States has published it.
What the federal schedule says
NIST finalised the first post-quantum standards in 2024 and followed them with NIST IR 8547, the transition roadmap. The NSA’s CNSA 2.0 suite sets a parallel timeline for national security systems, and Executive Order 14412 with OMB guidance pulls federal agencies onto the same dates.
| Date | Milestone | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 2030 | RSA-2048 and ECC P-256 deprecated | The 112-bit classical algorithms stop being acceptable for new systems. |
| 2030–33 | CNSA 2.0 becomes exclusive | Networking equipment first, then operating systems, applications and cloud services. |
| 2035 | Quantum-vulnerable algorithms removed | Full migration. Every federal system off classical public-key cryptography. |
Migration at that scale means an inventory of every cryptographic dependency an organisation has, including those embedded in hardware bought a decade ago, then years of replacement. Texas holds a lot of what this applies to: the grid, the pipelines, the ports, the defense installations.
The second question: who owns it
The asset is the patent portfolio, the fabrication know-how, the tooling, and the few thousand people who can build and run the hardware. Fund the research, publish it, then buy the finished devices from somewhere else, and the advantage has moved.
Why it lands in Texas
- San Antonio holds the largest concentration of cybersecurity employment in the state (military, federal and commercial), the workforce the cryptographic migration runs on.
- The mid-cities between Dallas and Fort Worth carry one of the densest aerospace and defense manufacturing corridors in the country, and quantum sensing sells into it today.
- The semiconductor base in Austin and North Texas is the supply chain quantum hardware depends on; the state’s first quantum award came out of the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund for exactly that reason.
- The energy sector gives the state a domestic customer for optimisation and sensing before any of it becomes a general-purpose computer.
Those are advantages, not a plan. They either get organised into an industry or get published and exported, and which one happens is a commercialization question.
The commercialization case