IBM Unveils Nighthawk r3, a 520-Qubit Quantum Chip for 2027

Modular instead of monolithic

Rather than build one oversized chip, IBM is betting on mid-sized chips connected like Lego bricks. "We want to build a modular system of quantum processors of around 500 qubits," said Oliver Dial, IBM's vice president for quantum systems, at a press briefing. He said the approach makes it easy to discard faulty chips and keep only the best performers. IBM has developed special connectors to join the chips, which were successfully tested this year.

Nighthawk r2 already in use

The current Nighthawk r2 has 120 qubits and stands out for its speed: IBM says it can run up to 100,000 calculations per second, repeating the same calculation millions or even billions of times to get the most reliable result. Customers have launched more than 34 billion calculations since September. German utility E.ON uses it to optimize the European power grid, and the Cleveland Clinic used it to simulate proteins for drug design, combining two quantum computers and three classical supercomputers. A Nighthawk r2 system is due to be installed in Lugano, Switzerland.

All of this paves the way to Starling, IBM's first quantum computer able to correct its own errors, expected in 2029. Errors remain the main weakness of quantum machines, and Starling is meant to perform 100 million operations while correcting them. Dial estimates it will need "somewhere around 20" connectors between modules. Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research, said the value of quantum computing will reach new heights as the architecture scales.

The timeline matches that of other tech giants: Google and Cloudflare say organizations should be ready for a quantum computer as early as 2029, and have accelerated the move to post-quantum encryption.