IBM Pushes Quantum Boundaries with New Nighthawk and Loon Chips

At its annual Quantum Developer Conference in Atlanta, IBM introduced two cutting-edge processors—Quantum Nighthawk and Quantum Loon—alongside major software and algorithmic upgrades.

Quantum Nighthawk boasts 120 qubits and 218 next-generation tunable couplers in a square-lattice architecture, enabling circuits with 30 % more complexity compared to prior models.

IBM anticipates this will support up to 5,000 two-qubit gates initially, scaling to 10,000 or more by 2027 and reaching 15,000 by 2028 with up to 1,000 connected qubits.

Meanwhile, Quantum Loon demonstrates all essential hardware components required for fault-tolerant quantum computing, including long-range couplers and advanced qubit-reset capabilities.

On the software front, IBM’s Qiskit quantum computing stack now gains dynamic circuit capabilities delivering a 24 % accuracy boost at the 100-plus-qubit scale, and a new execution model that cuts the cost of accurate result extraction by more than 100-fold using high-performance classical compute.

The company also reported a ten-fold speedup in error-correction decoding using qLDPC codes—achieved ahead of schedule.

“There are many pillars to bringing truly useful quantum computing to the world,” said Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow. “We believe that IBM is the only company that is positioned to rapidly invent and scale quantum software, hardware, fabrication, and error correction to unlock transformative applications.”

IBM’s roadmap is clearly dual-targeted: near-term achievement of quantum advantage and longer-term deployment of fault-tolerant machines. With Nighthawk expected to be ready by end of 2025 and community-driven verification initiatives already underway, IBM is inviting the research ecosystem to validate its claims.

Earlier this year, IBM announced plans to build the world’s first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. Named IBM Quantum Starling, the system will be developed at a new quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, New York.