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IBM Unveils Nighthawk and Loon Quantum Chips, Targets 2026 Advantage

IBM seeks third-party verification via a new community tracker.

An IBM researcher holds the wafer, or the slice of silicon used to create processors and chips, for the company’s Loon experimental quantum processor.
Google Quantum AI's Hartmut Neven, left, and Anthony Megrant examine a cryostat refrigerator for cooling quantum computing chips at Google's Quantum AI lab in Santa Barbara, California, on November 25, 2024.
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IBM’s Nanotech Complex wafer fabrication facility in Albany, New York.

Overview

  • Nighthawk features 120 qubits linked by 218 tunable couplers, enabling circuits with about 30% greater complexity and up to 5,000 two‑qubit gates, with access for IBM users expected by late 2025.
  • Loon debuts as an experimental platform for scalable error correction, using six‑way, out‑of‑plane qubit links to demonstrate hardware elements needed on IBM’s path to fault‑tolerant systems by 2029.
  • IBM shifted quantum processor fabrication to a 300 mm wafer line at the Albany NanoTech Complex, cutting build time roughly in half and increasing chip physical complexity by a factor of ten.
  • The company reports real‑time qLDPC error decoding in under 480 nanoseconds, part of broader progress in error correction and validation infrastructure.
  • IBM projects verifiable quantum advantage by the end of 2026 and launched an open tracker with Algorithmiq, the Flatiron Institute, and BlueQubit to enable independent benchmarking of claims.