IBM has said it will achieve quantum advantage by the end of 2026, and is on target to develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029.

The company also unveiled its IBM Quantum Nighthawk chip, offering 120 qubits linked together with 218 next-generation tunable couplers in a square lattice formation.

Nighthawk 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.

IBM will make Nighthawk available to customers by the end of 2025. 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.

In order to support the scaling of its quantum computers, IBM has announced that the primary fabrication for its quantum processor wafers will now be undertaken at an advanced 300mm wafer fabrication facility at NY Creates' Albany NanoTech Complex in New York.

The path to fault-tolerant

In addition to launching Nighthawk, IBM also announced its Quantum Loon chip, an experimental processor that will not be made publicly available, but the company said it will be the driving force behind IBM's efforts to deliver the world’s first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029.

Speaking to journalists following the announcements, IBM’s Quantum EMEA leader Adam Hammond explained that the company published a paper last year that outlined a new error correcting code that demonstrated the process could be achieved with fewer qubits than previously thought.

“One of the key things is that to do error correction, you have to use a very large number of physical qubits to create a logical qubit, and there were conjectures that this was hundreds or thousands,” Hammond explained. “What we actually came up with was a code that says you could use 288 physical qubits for two logical qubits, which was a dramatic reduction. It required some engineering changes to our chip – our new chip [Nighthawk] has four-way connectivity. We actually need six-way connectivity to do it in production. Loon is the first chip that has that six-way connectivity.”

IBM has also updated its quantum roadmap with the expectation that the “first cases of verified quantum advantage” will be confirmed by the industry by the end of 2026. In an effort to better verify claims on quantum advantage moving forward, IBM has released a community tracker that monitors results based on three experiments – observable estimations, variational problems, and classically verifiable problems.

Hammond said that while IBM’s fault-tolerant machine is still just under half a decade away, he’s already speaking to enterprises about becoming early adopters of the technology.

“An enterprise transformation normally takes you three to four years, so if you want to be a first mover or to get competitive advantage, you probably do need to start thinking about the kind of use cases that might be interesting, or could give you some kind of return, and start thinking about how you develop prototype and start integrating into your workflow,” he said.