The Quantum Internet (even within short distances) may provide an exponential scale-up of the quantum computing power through the distributed computing paradigm.
Specifically, by interconnecting isolated quantum devices via a communication network and by adopting a distributed approach, a virtual quantum processor is built up and it is constituted by a number of qubits that scales exponentially with just a linear amount of physical resources, i.e., the number of interconnected devices.
Hence, if we consider two isolated N-qubit devices (e.g N=10), they can represent ~2N (e.g. ~210) states each, thanks to the superposition principle, for a total of ~2x210=~2N+1 (e.g. ~2x210=211) states at once. But if we interconnect these two devices with a quantum network, the resulting cluster can represent up to ~22xN (e.g. 220) states, with an exponential increase of the associated state space dimensionality.
Interconnecting M devices of N qubits with a quantum network,
the resulting cluster can represent up to 2MXN states.
Key to the exponential scaling of computational power.