Quantum State of Play

The annealing company just went gate-model: D-Wave put a 99.9%-fidelity entangling gate on erasure qubits in Nature, while IBM buys its way into silicon spin.

99.9%

D-Wave gate fidelity

23 Jul

IBM buys HRL

First

topological gate set

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 23 JulIBM agrees to acquire HRL Laboratories, the Boeing and GM venture behind silicon-spin qubits, putting a second qubit technology beside its superconducting programme.
4. JulyQuantinuum and academic partners demonstrate the first universal topological gate set from non-Abelian anyons on the H2 processor (Nature).
5. JuneMicrosoft unveils its second-generation Majorana 2 topological chip.
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.

Quantinuum's quarter: revenue up 279% to $8m with $2.1bn in cash, a near-five-nines logical-fidelity claim on Helios, and the machine itself moving into Oracle's cloud.

+279%

Quantinuum revenue, YoY

$2.1bn

Quantinuum cash

+287%

IonQ revenue, YoY

1. 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.
2. 6 AugIonQ's day of contracts: its Capella space division wins an NRO radar-augmentation award, and DARPA extends its atomic-clock programme by $28m for 25 Evergreen-05 optical clocks, with a $30m option for 100 more.
3. 6 AugRigetti reports Q2: revenue of $5.1m against a GAAP net loss of $52.6m, restating Cepheus-1-108Q's fidelity figures rather than announcing new hardware.
4. 5 AugIonQ reports a record quarter: $80.1m of revenue, up 287% year on year, full-year guidance raised to $280m-$290m, and $3.0bn of cash and investments in the bank.
5. 5 AugD-Wave stakes a gate-model claim in Nature and sets a new target: 100 logical qubits by 2032. Two days earlier it signed a quantum application deal with Nasdaq Verafin.
6. 3 AugIonQ and Tennessee utility EPB open a quantum communications research centre, claiming the first commercial quantum memory running in a live fibre network. A national-security co-design agreement with Sandia followed a day later.
7. 30 JulIBM and partners publish three simultaneous quantum-advantage claims, with Qedma, Algorithmiq and the University of Chicago, each open to classical challenge on a public tracker. A week on, none has been challenged.
8. 31 JulIonQ completes its acquisition of chip fabricator SkyWater Technology, taking chip fabrication in-house.
9. DiaryQuantinuum's first earnings as a listed company land on 11 August; IonQ hosts an investor day on 8 September; IBM's HRL acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter.
10. 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.
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.

NVIDIA's open Ising decoders cut colour-code logical error rates by 347.7 times, and 17 hardware builders have adopted NVQLink.

347.7x

error-rate cut

17

NVQLink builders

9

US national labs

1. 13 JulNVIDIA releases its open Ising decoder family, cutting colour-code logical error rates by 347.7 times.
2. StandingNVQLink, adopted by 17 hardware builders and nine US national laboratories, couples QPUs to GPUs so correction happens live rather than afterwards.
3. 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.

D-Wave's new erasure-qubit gate promises a tenfold error cut per code-distance step, and Quantinuum's Helios holds a Sandia-verified 7.9e-4 two-qubit infidelity.

10x

error cut per code step

7.9e-4

Helios 2-qubit infidelity

Below

surface-code threshold

1. 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.
2. 2026Quantinuum's 98-qubit Helios carries a Sandia-verified two-qubit infidelity of 7.9e-4 (Nature).
3. StandingGoogle's Willow and USTC's Zuchongzhi 3.2 have both run surface codes below threshold.
4. StandingAI-assisted decoders keep cutting logical error rates, so the yardstick is now logical quality held across deep circuits.

Executive Order 14412 sets US federal deadlines of 2030 for encryption and 2031 for authentication, with the NSA's procurement gate opening in January 2027.

2030

US encryption deadline

Jan 27

CNSA 2.0 gate

2031

authentication

1. 13 AugXanadu partners with the University of Alberta's chemistry department to design photosensitizers for photodynamic cancer therapy with quantum algorithms.
2. 4 AugInnovate UK opens applications for a £13m quantum-computing applications competition, £300,000 to £4m per project; the NQCC opens SparQ industry-channel trial access the next day.
3. JuneExecutive Order 14412 sets US federal deadlines of 2030 for encryption and 2031 for authentication.
4. Jan 2027The NSA's CNSA 2.0 procurement gate opens.
5. JulyQuantinuum signs a fluid-dynamics agreement with Rolls-Royce, with engagements spanning logistics, finance and industrial design.
6. StandingClassic McEliece became the first post-quantum algorithm to gain an ISO standard, and exact molecular simulation remains the long-term prize.