Quantum Computing
Beyond classical silicon: qubits, quantum supremacy and applications
Overview
The global race toward practical quantum advantage. From superconducting qubits to trapped ions, every approach aims to solve problems impossible for classical computers.
Impact: Potential new tools for simulation, optimization and cryptography
Involved actors
Projects
Active
IBM — Nighthawk, Loon and the road to Starling
IBM
Three quantum advantage demonstrations on July 30, 2026, including a 70-logical-qubit computation run with the University of Chicago. Over $10 billion committed to the roadmap.
Superconducting processors. Nighthawk — 120 qubits, 218 tunable couplers, up to 5,000 two-qubit gates — has been available to Premium and Flex users since January 5, 2026, alongside the latest Heron (156 qubits). The experimental Loon chip demonstrated the hardware building blocks of a fault-tolerant architecture: long-range couplers, multilayer routing and fast qubit reset. Separately, IBM ran real-time decoding of a qLDPC code in under 480 nanoseconds on an off-the-shelf FPGA. Announced intermediate steps: Kookaburra in 2026, Cockatoo in 2027.
- Superconductors
- Qiskit
- qLDPC correction
- Logical qubits
Roadmap: Starling — 200 logical qubits and 100 million operations
2029
Google Quantum AI — Willow and Quantum Echoes
First verifiable quantum advantage, published in Nature. Google still has its third milestone ahead: a long-lived logical qubit.
Willow, 105 superconducting qubits, remains the most recent chip: it demonstrated that the error rate falls as qubits are added. In October 2025, the Quantum Echoes algorithm produced the first verifiable quantum advantage, roughly 13,000 times faster than the best known classical method. In March 2026, Google opened a second hardware track on neutral atoms, without abandoning superconductors.
- Superconductors
- Error correction
- Verifiable advantage
- Neutral atoms
Roadmap: Milestone 3 — a long-lived logical qubit
Non daté
IonQ — Tempo and the sixth generation on a chip
IonQ
$80.1M in revenue in the second quarter of 2026, up 287% year over year. Sustained acquisition drive: Oxford Ionics, Vector Atomic, SkyWater.
Trapped-ion approach, with all-to-all qubit connectivity. The 100-qubit Tempo system reached the 64 algorithmic qubit mark on September 25, 2025, three months ahead of the announced schedule. The sixth generation, etched on a chip, targets 256 qubits: a first system was sold to the University of Cambridge in the first quarter of 2026.
- Trapped ions
- On-chip traps
- Quantum cloud
- Logical qubits
Roadmap: 12 logical qubits and 100 to 256 physical qubits at 99.99% fidelity
2026
Pasqal — Orion Gamma and neutral atoms
Pasqal
Europe's neutral-atom champion, with machines installed in Germany, France, Italy, Quebec and Saudi Arabia. The quantum advantage targeted for the end of the first quarter of 2026 has not been announced to date.
French startup: neutral atoms held by optical tweezers. The installed base includes Jade, at the Jülich computing center, and Ruby, at the CEA's TGCC — both 100-qubit machines, inaugurated on November 13, 2025 under the European HPCQS program — plus one machine at Aramco and another at DistriQ in Quebec. SOL, an Orion-generation machine with 140 qubits, was inaugurated at CINECA in Bologna on June 11, 2026 — Pasqal's third system in Europe. In May 2026, Pasqal showed logical qubits outperforming physical qubits on solving differential equations.
- Neutral atoms
- Quantum simulation
- Logical qubits
- European HPC
Roadmap: Vela — more than 200 physical qubits
2027