Quantum State of Play

IBM's HRL acquisition completed on 26 August, putting silicon spin beside its superconducting line, and Japan's Shunkai neutral-atom machine came online at roughly 50 qubits, with around 500 planned.

26 Aug

IBM completes HRL

~50

Shunkai qubits, live

99.9%

D-Wave gate fidelity

1. 26 AugIBM completes its acquisition of HRL Laboratories, the Boeing and GM venture behind silicon-spin qubits, agreed on 23 July: a second qubit technology now sits in-house beside the superconducting programme, with terms undisclosed and both former owners staying on as partners. Read our report →
2. 24 AugJapan's first full-stack neutral-atom quantum computer, Shunkai, is operational at the Institute for Molecular Science: roughly 50 qubits now and around 500 planned, built under the Moonshot programme with Infleqtion contributing to the quantum processing unit, and partially open to external users.
3. 11 AugPasqal reports trapping four neutral atoms with light delivered from a photonic chip in place of the optical bench: a company claim, with no paper and no fidelity figures attached, against the 2,088-site array in its own 2024 paper. Read our report →
4. 5 AugD-Wave demonstrates a two-qubit entangling gate at roughly 99.9% fidelity in about 500 nanoseconds on dual-rail erasure qubits, published in Nature: its first serious gate-model hardware claim after two decades of annealing.
5. JulyQuantinuum and academic partners demonstrate the first universal topological gate set from non-Abelian anyons on the H2 processor (Nature).
6. StandingSeveral rival physical approaches remain in play, from superconducting circuits to laser-cooled atoms, and the pivot is towards those that natively support scaling and error correction.

Pasqal traded its first Nasdaq session on 28 August, closing at $19.11 with roughly $360m of cash from its completed business combination, and Canada signed CAD $195m into Xanadu's Toronto photonics plant the same day.

$19.11

Pasqal debut close

CAD $195m

Canada backs Xanadu

26 Aug

IBM completes HRL

1. 28 AugPasqal begins trading on Nasdaq as PSQL, a day after completing its business combination with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II with roughly $360m of cash at closing; the shares end their first session at $19.11. On 24 August it also formed Pasqal Arabia with Eleven Ventures, a joint venture to deploy neutral-atom systems across Saudi Arabia and the wider region.
2. 28 AugXanadu signs a definitive agreement with the Government of Canada for a CAD $195m investment through the Strategic Response Fund, the federal anchor of Project OPTIMISM: a CAD $893m plan for a 158,000 sq ft photonics research and manufacturing facility in Toronto, creating 275 high-skilled jobs.
3. 26 AugIBM completes its acquisition of HRL Laboratories, agreed on 23 July: silicon-spin qubits and quantum sensing join the superconducting programme, terms undisclosed, and former owners Boeing and General Motors continue as partners on quantum applications. Read our report →
4. 25 AugIonQ researchers post a real-time decoder for a MegaQuOp trapped-ion machine on arXiv, benchmarked to 408 logical qubits on 12 cores of a single Apple M4 Max: the case, two weeks before the 8 September investor day, that its fault tolerance needs no FPGAs or ASICs.
5. 25 AugIonQ appoints Dr Eric Ball and Timothy Baxter to its board; a day earlier its Skyloom optical communications terminals reached 84 on-orbit installations.
6. 25 AugD-Wave's chief financial officer John Markovich announces his retirement, resigning with effect from 2 September; Greg Golkov, senior vice president of finance since May 2023, steps up as acting CFO. The company says the departure involves no disagreement over its business, accounting or reporting.
7. 19 AugRigetti creates a dedicated systems delivery organisation to scale customer deployments, appointing David Rivas to the newly created chief operating officer role and Andrew Bestwick chief technology officer.
8. 19 AugIBM connects and cools its first two modular cryogenic systems as a single environment: over eight feet tall, 4 kelvin in under five days, settling below 15 millikelvin. Nighthawk processors go inside later this year, on the roadmap that puts 1,000-plus linked qubits in 2027 and Starling in 2029. Read our report →
9. 18 AugIonQ signs a memorandum with Canada's CMC Microsystems to become a listed cloud provider on the FABrIC Quantum Computing Sandbox, funded by the Government of Canada's Strategic Response Fund, opening its trapped-ion systems to Canadian academics and small firms.
10. 14 AugQuantinuum and Quanta Computer agree to develop the hardware infrastructure for its future systems together, aiming at machines that are modular and manufacturable at scale. Announced late on 13 August US time; no figures disclosed.
11. 11 AugQuantinuum reports Q2: revenue up 279% to $8m, $2.1bn in cash, full-year guidance of $28-32m, and a claim of near five-nines logical fidelity on Helios. The same day, Oracle announces it will host Helios on-premises in an OCI AI data centre.
12. DiaryIonQ hosts an investor day on 8 September.
13. StandingRoadmaps now carry dated fault-tolerance targets rather than ambitions: IBM's Starling is set for 2029, and the advantage era has opened ahead of the end-2026 target.

Oracle is installing Quantinuum's Helios inside a US OCI AI data centre under an 11 August multi-year partnership, with an OCI quantum service to preview in the coming months.

98

Helios qubits, on OCI

25 Jul

Qiskit adds Orbit

1. 11 AugOracle and Quantinuum announce a multi-year partnership: Helios, the 98-qubit trapped-ion system, moves on-premises into a US Oracle Cloud AI data centre under OCI's identity and governance controls, with an OCI quantum service to preview in the coming months. No site, price or contract value disclosed. IBM, IonQ and Google all house their machines in their own facilities. Read our report →
2. 25 JulQiskit's Functions catalogue adds Orbit, automating dynamical decoupling, hardware-aware transpilation and measurement error mitigation.
3. StandingNVIDIA's CUDA-Q ships real-time error-correction tooling for its NVQLink interconnect.
4. JuneHPE announces quantum-HPC integration with eight hardware companies.
5. StandingAWS Braket and Azure Quantum remain the broadest cloud entry points.

A 408-logical-qubit trapped-ion machine can be decoded in real time on 12 cores of one laptop CPU, IonQ's researchers report on arXiv, and NVIDIA's open Ising decoders hold a 347.7-times error-rate cut.

408

logical qubits, one CPU

347.7x

error-rate cut

12x

wiring space per module

1. 25 AugIonQ researchers post a complete real-time decoding pipeline for a MegaQuOp trapped-ion machine on arXiv, benchmarked to 408 logical qubits and up to a million T gates on a single 2024 Apple M4 Max using 12 of its 16 cores: trapped ions' millisecond syndrome cycles, they argue, mean fault tolerance needs no FPGAs or ASICs.
2. 19 AugIBM connects two cryogenic modules through its L-coupler and runs them as one environment, reaching 4 kelvin in under five days and settling below 15 millikelvin, with twelve times the wiring space of its current systems in each module's vacuum enclosure. Read our report →
3. 13 JulNVIDIA releases its open Ising decoder family, cutting colour-code logical error rates by 347.7 times. Read our report →
4. StandingNVQLink, adopted by 17 hardware builders and nine US national laboratories, couples QPUs to GPUs so correction happens live rather than afterwards.
5. StandingRiverlane and Zurich Instruments continue building decode-and-control stacks for thousand-qubit machines.

Algorithm research has moved off near-term heuristics to phase estimation and utility-scale simulation, written for hardware that corrects its own errors.

1. StandingResearch has moved off the near-term heuristic methods that error-prone hardware defeats, standard VQE among them.
2. StandingThe focus is now deep utility-scale algorithms such as phase estimation and advanced quantum simulation.
3. StandingThese are written for hardware that corrects its own errors, which every roadmap now assumes arrives.

One laptop-class CPU decodes a 408-logical-qubit trapped-ion machine in real time on IonQ's new benchmark, and D-Wave's erasure-qubit gate promises a tenfold error cut per code-distance step.

1M

T gates decoded live

10x

error cut per code step

7.9e-4

Helios 2-qubit infidelity

1. 25 AugIonQ publishes a real-time decoder for a MegaQuOp quantum computer on arXiv: benchmarked to 408 logical qubits and up to a million T gates on 12 cores of a single Apple M4 Max, keeping pace with syndrome-extraction cycles of 1 to 5 milliseconds.
2. 5 AugD-Wave demonstrates a 99.9%-fidelity entangling gate in about 500 nanoseconds on dual-rail erasure qubits (Nature), with simulations showing logical error rates falling tenfold for each step up in code distance.
3. 2026Quantinuum's 98-qubit Helios carries a Sandia-verified two-qubit infidelity of 7.9e-4 (Nature).
4. StandingGoogle's Willow and USTC's Zuchongzhi 3.2 have both run surface codes below threshold.
5. StandingAI-assisted decoders keep cutting logical error rates, so the yardstick is now logical quality held across deep circuits.

The first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction sits in block 964,199, mined on 26 August with a hash-based lock and no protocol change, and the US Treasury now runs a Quantum-Readiness Task Force for the financial sector.

964,199

quantum-safe BTC block

65.3%

DOCOMO signalling cut

2030

US encryption deadline

1. 26 AugThe first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction is mined on mainnet, in block 964,199. StarkWare's Avihu Levy designed the hash-based Quantum-Safe Bitcoin scheme as an after-hours project, engineer Tomer Giladi finished the implementation, and MARA's Slipstream service mined the non-standard transaction: no soft fork, no private key, security resting on hash functions Shor's algorithm cannot break.
2. 24 AugThe US Treasury launches its Quantum-Readiness Task Force, a public-private initiative with workstreams on sector alignment, vendor readiness and digital-asset risk; the same day the GSA describes its work under OMB memo M-26-15, with a 17-agency identity-management working group already meeting.
3. 18 AugNTT DOCOMO puts a second D-Wave application into production, optimising network signalling: daily-peak location-registration signals cut 65.3% and paging signals 7.0%, with a representative 333-base-station problem solved in about five minutes.
4. 13 AugXanadu partners with the University of Alberta's chemistry department to design photosensitizers for photodynamic cancer therapy with quantum algorithms.
5. JuneExecutive Order 14412 sets US federal deadlines of 2030 for encryption and 2031 for authentication.
6. Jan 2027The NSA's CNSA 2.0 procurement gate opens.
7. StandingClassic McEliece became the first post-quantum algorithm to gain an ISO standard, and exact molecular simulation remains the long-term prize. Read our report →