IBM Nighthawk r2 raises circuit throughput about 25 times

What happened

IBM's Nighthawk r2 carries 120 programmable qubits, 218 couplers and 120 reset elements, 458 physical quantum elements in total. IBM reports more than 100,000 circuits per second against roughly 4,000 for its Heron processor, while holding Heron-class gate fidelity. The speed comes from active reset: linking a qubit through a tunable coupler to a cold environment pulls its effective T1 from a median of about 200 microseconds down to roughly 25 nanoseconds, and cuts initialisation error by around 25 times. IBM says the chip returns accurate results on circuits of more than 7,500 gates, which it counts as a 2026 milestone on its published roadmap. This is throughput, not error correction, and it moves nothing on the Q-Day estimate above.