Quantum computing company Rigetti launched its 84-qubit Ankaa-3 system in late December 2024.
In a statement, the company said its new flagship system features an “extensive hardware redesign that enables superior performance.”
This includes a new cryogenic hardware design to reduce the amount of metal at the refrigerator’s coldest stage, increasing efficiency and reducing the cost per qubit, and an improved qubit chip consisting of a new metal deposition method for qubit circuitry and an optimized circuit layout.
The company has also used its ABAA technique for precise qubit frequency targeting to manufacture its chip’s Josephson junctions and invested heavily in the control technologies underpinning its quantum processors to produce gates with lower incoherent errors.
Rigetti also claimed the Ankaa-3 allowed the company to celebrate a two-qubit gate fidelity milestone by successfully halving error rates in 2024 to achieve a median 99.0 percent iSWAP gate fidelity and demonstrate 99.5 percent median fidelity fSim gates.
"The remarkable performance of Ankaa-3 reinforces our leadership in the superconducting quantum computing field - which we believe is the winning modality for high-performance quantum computers due to their many advantages, including fast gate speeds and well-established manufacturing processes," said Dr. Subodh Kulkarni, Rigetti CEO.
The company’s CFO, David Rivas, added: “Our teams, across the technology stack, work incredibly hard to introduce new, innovative ways to increase our system’s performance. As we continue the journey towards fault tolerance, we are constructing computing systems with capabilities that have not been seen before.”
Ankaa-3 is available now to partners via the Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services platform (QCS), the quantum computer will be accessible on Amazon Braket and Microsoft Azure in the first quarter of 2025.
A month before launching the Ankaa-3, Rigetti announced it had raised $100 million through the sale of common stock, as part of its “at-the-market” equity offering program that began in March. The company has a current market cap of around $525m and in October 2024 narrowly avoided being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after its share price briefly fell below $1.
In Q3 2024, the company posted total revenues of $2.4m, while net loss for the three months was $14.8m.
