Quantum State of Play

IonQ has announced Superion 256, with orders open and deliveries planned for 2027. The company reports first ions in a prototype using SkyWater-fabricated processors.

256

physical qubits · announced

2027

planned deliveries

1. 8 SepSuperion 256 is an announced product with a working prototype milestone. IonQ dates customer deliveries to 2027. Read more →
2. 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 more →
3. 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.
4. 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 more →
5. 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.
6. JulyQuantinuum and academic partners demonstrate the first universal topological gate set from non-Abelian anyons on the H2 processor (Nature).
7. 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.

D-Wave, Rigetti, Quantinuum and PsiQuantum announced definitive US CHIPS R&D agreements on 8 September, totalling up to $400m. Four of the nine May letters of intent are now definitive agreements. The programme requires minority, non-controlling government equity stakes as a funding condition; agreed awards do not mean all cash has been disbursed.

Up to $400m

four announced R&D awards

8 Sep

definitive agreements

Minority

non-controlling equity condition

1. 8 SepD-Wave’s agreement provides access to up to $100m for annealing and gate-model R&D. Disbursement remains subject to conditions, including milestones, and the government is to receive a minority, non-controlling stake. Read more →
2. 8 SepRigetti’s $100m agreement targets readout electronics, cryogenic capacity and chip fabrication. The company explicitly states that a minority, non-controlling government stake is a condition of receiving funding. Read more →
3. 8 SepQuantinuum finalised a $100m agreement for trapped-ion manufacturing R&D, following its May letter of intent. The company names GlobalFoundries and Monarch Quantum as domestic supply-chain partners. Read more →
4. 8 SepPsiQuantum signs its own final CHIPS award of up to $100m the same day, funding electro-optic materials, single-photon detectors and packaging work at its Santa Clara facility, under the same minority, non-controlling equity condition. Four of the nine May letters of intent are now definitive agreements. Read more →
5. 8 SepIonQ raises its full-year 2026 outlook at its investor day: combined revenue of $450m to $460m with SkyWater consolidated from the 31 July acquisition date, standalone guidance reaffirmed at $280m to $290m. Read more →
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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 more →
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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 more →
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. 21 MayCommerce’s original letters of intent already included the equity condition for the selected companies, including Quantinuum. The September announcements move these three awards to definitive agreements. Read more →

Oracle and Quantinuum’s 11 August announcement plans to install Helios inside a US OCI AI data centre. Oracle describes a quantum-service preview in the coming months. The announcement is a deployment plan and does not confirm general availability on OCI.

98

Helios physical qubits

Planned

OCI installation and service preview

1. 10 SepXanadu and AMD launch Backline, an open-source PennyLane extension linking CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and SmartNICs to quantum hardware at sub-3-microsecond latency, aimed at real-time error correction and sensing (company release). Read more →
2. 11 AugThe partners plan to put the 98-physical-qubit Helios system inside a US OCI AI data centre, integrating it with OCI compute, identity and governance. Oracle’s announcement gives a future preview window without a firm launch date. Read more →
3. 25 JulQiskit's Functions catalogue adds Orbit, automating dynamical decoupling, hardware-aware transpilation and measurement error mitigation.
4. StandingNVIDIA's CUDA-Q ships real-time error-correction tooling for its NVQLink interconnect.
5. JuneHPE announces quantum-HPC integration with eight hardware companies.
6. StandingAWS Braket and Azure Quantum remain the broadest cloud entry points.

Quantinuum’s CHIPS programme joins chip fabrication, control electronics and optical supply chains. GlobalFoundries and Monarch Quantum are among the partners named in the company’s manufacturing announcement.

300mm

wafer manufacturing route

1. 8 SepQuantinuum names 300mm wafer fabrication for future ion traps and control electronics, alongside scalable lasers and optical components. Read more →
2. 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.
3. 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 more →
4. 13 JulNVIDIA releases its open Ising decoder family, cutting colour-code logical error rates by 347.7 times. Read more →
5. StandingNVQLink, adopted by 17 hardware builders and nine US national laboratories, couples QPUs to GPUs so correction happens live rather than afterwards.
6. StandingRiverlane and Zurich Instruments continue building decode-and-control stacks for thousand-qubit machines.

IonQ’s compiled resource estimate puts a secp256k1 discrete-logarithm attempt at 25.7 days on a proposed 19,397-physical-qubit machine. The study models a future fault-tolerant architecture.

25.7 days

estimated time per attempt

19,397

physical qubits in design

1,457

logical qubits

1. 8 SepThe estimate maps Shor’s algorithm into error correction, routing and hardware resources. Its machine requirements are assumptions for a future system. Read more →
2. StandingResearch has moved off the near-term heuristic methods that error-prone hardware defeats, standard VQE among them.
3. StandingThe focus is now deep utility-scale algorithms such as phase estimation and advanced quantum simulation.
4. StandingThese are written for hardware that corrects its own errors, which every roadmap now assumes arrives.

Superion’s processor design combines electronic qubit control with SkyWater fabrication. IonQ’s prototype and planned 2027 deliveries make manufacturing repeatability the next product milestone.

2027

Superion 256 delivery target

1. 8 SepIonQ is developing the larger Superion 10K platform alongside its 256-qubit product. Capacity and delivery targets remain company roadmap commitments. Read more →
2. 2 SepQuantinuum researchers post experimental validation of the C4-Helix fault-tolerant architecture on Helios: a logical error rate of 4.6e-5 per logical qubit per correction cycle, logical Clifford error of 2.8e-4 per two-qubit gate, and a three-logical-qubit GHZ state at 99.925% fidelity or better (arXiv preprint). Read more →
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 2026Quantinuum's 98-qubit Helios carries a Sandia-verified two-qubit infidelity of 7.9e-4 (Nature).
6. StandingGoogle's Willow and USTC's Zuchongzhi 3.2 have both run surface codes below threshold.
7. StandingAI-assisted decoders keep cutting logical error rates, so the yardstick is now logical quality held across deep circuits.

IonQ’s new cryptography study offers a concrete resource estimate for secp256k1 signatures. The company explicitly describes a theoretical future machine; organisations can use the assumptions when assessing post-quantum migration.

40.7%

proven lower bound · success per attempt

1. 8 SepThe paper’s 25.7-day estimate is per attempt, with a 40.7% proven lower bound on success under its assumptions. IonQ states that a machine capable of this computation has yet to be built. Read more →
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 13 AugXanadu partners with the University of Alberta's chemistry department to design photosensitizers for photodynamic cancer therapy with quantum algorithms.
6. JuneExecutive Order 14412 sets US federal deadlines of 2030 for encryption and 2031 for authentication.
7. Jan 2027The NSA's CNSA 2.0 procurement gate opens.
8. StandingClassic McEliece became the first post-quantum algorithm to gain an ISO standard, and exact molecular simulation remains the long-term prize. Read more →