IBM has launched its first Quantum Nighthawk processor, dubbed IBM_Miami, and announced it is releasing its IBM_Boston offering, with the latter described by the company as its “most powerful IBM Quantum Heron r3 to date.”

The successor to the IBM_Pittsburgh QPU (quantum processing unit), IBM_Miami is now available to customers as an exploratory, early-access preview via IBM’s Premium and Flex plans.

According to the company, IBM_Miami “delivers the highest T1 coherence times of any IBM quantum processor ever with a median of ~350 µs,” with IBM publishing metrics for the QPU alongside the announcement that it claims are even better than those previously demonstrated.

First unveiled in November 2025, Nighthawk offers 120 qubits linked together with 218 next-generation tunable couplers in a square lattice formation.

It connects to 20 percent more couplers than IBM’s Quantum Heron chip, with the company saying its increased qubit connectivity allows users to accurately execute circuits with 30 percent more complexity and work on problems that require up to 5,000 two-qubit gates.

Like Heron, the first generation of Nighthawk can execute 5,000 2-qubit gates in a single quantum circuit, an important milestone on the IBM Quantum Roadmap, the company said. Future iterations of the chip are expected to deliver up to 7,500 gates by the end of 2026, and then up to 10,000 gates in 2027, the company said.

Alongside the unveiling of Nighthawk last year, IBM also said it would achieve quantum advantage by the end of 2026, and is on target to develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029.