New Delhi, December 2023.

At the annual IBM Quantum Summit in New York, IBM (NYSE: IBM) debuted ‘IBM Quantum Heron,’ the first in a new series of utilityscale quantum processors with an architecture engineered over the past four years to deliver IBM’s highest performance metrics and lowest error rates of any IBM Quantum processor to date.   

IBM also unveiled IBM Quantum System Two, the company’s first modular quantum computer and cornerstone of IBM’s quantum-centric supercomputing architecture. The first IBM Quantum System Two, located in Yorktown Heights, New York, has begun operations with three IBM Heron processors and supporting control electronics.

With this critical foundation now in place, along with other breakthroughs in quantum hardware, theory, and software, the company is extending its IBM Quantum Development Roadmap to 2033 with new targets to significantly advance the quality of gate operations. Doing so would increase the size of quantum circuits able to be run and help to realize the full potential of quantum computing at scale.   

“We are firmly within the era in which quantum computers are being used as a tool to explore new frontiers of science,” said Dario Gil, IBM SVP and Director of Research. “As we continue to advance how quantum systems can scale and deliver value through modular architectures, we will further increase the quality of a utility-scale quantum technology stack – and put it into the hands of our users and partners who will push the boundaries of more complex problems.”   

As demonstrated by IBM earlier this year on a 127-qubit ‘IBM Quantum Eagle’ processor, IBM Quantum systems can now serve as a scientific tool to explore utility-scale classes of problems in chemistry, physics, and materials beyond brute force classical simulation of quantum mechanics.   

Since that demonstration, leading researchers, scientists, and engineers from organizations including the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Tokyo, the University of Washington, the University of Cologne, Harvard University, Qedma,  

Algorithmiq, UC Berkeley, Q-CTRL, Fundacion Ikerbasque, Donostia International Physics Center, and the university of the Basque Country, as well as IBM, have expanded demonstrations of utility-scale quantum computing to confirm its value in exploring uncharted computational territory.   

This includes experiments already running on the new IBM Quantum Heron 133-qubit processor, which IBM is making available for users today via the cloud. The IBM Heron is the first in IBM’s new class of performant processors with significantly improved error rates, offering a five-times improvement over the previous best records set by the IBM Eagle. Additional IBM Heron processors will join IBM’s industry-leading, utility-scale fleet of systems over the course of the next year.