Overview
- IBM’s Nighthawk processor features 120 qubits connected by 218 tunable couplers, enabling roughly 30% more circuit complexity and up to 5,000 two‑qubit gates, with availability to IBM users targeted by late 2025.
- Loon is an experimental, routing‑enabled processor that demonstrates hardware elements for large‑scale error correction, which IBM frames as a step toward fault‑tolerant quantum computing by 2029.
- The company says all roadmap chips are now fabricated on 300 mm wafers at the Albany NanoTech Complex, doubling development speed and increasing chip physical complexity by a factor of ten.
- To move beyond vendor claims, IBM launched a community‑led quantum advantage tracker with Algorithmiq, the Flatiron Institute and BlueQubit, aiming for community‑verified advantage by the end of 2026.
- IBM reports progress in error handling, including real‑time qLDPC decoding in under 480 nanoseconds and large reductions in error‑mitigation cost, while rivals such as Google and Microsoft continue competing and experts caution timelines remain uncertain.