On the occasion of the annual Quantum Developer Conference QDC 2025 conference taking place in Atlanta (USA), where IBM brings together developers, researchers and leaders of the quantum community from around the world, the company has announced important developments including the upcoming IBM Quantum Nighthawk and IBM Quantum Loon processors, which will pave the way towards large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing.
IBM Quantum Nighthawk and Heron
This year, the company has introduced the 120-qbit IBM Quantum Nighthawk, the first chip with a square qubit topology, increasing the number of couplers from Heron’s 176 to 218. This allows developers to design 30% more complex circuits with fewer SWAP gates, thus optimizing the performance of next-generation quantum processors.
Nighthawk is designed to scale both modularly and in performance. The company plans to enhance the Nighthawk line of processors with revisions that can run circuits with 5,000, 7,500, 10,000, and ultimately 15,000 quantum gates. IBM promised a Nighthawk capable of running 5,000 doors by the end of 2025, and according to the roadmap, everything indicates that it will be able to reach this milestone.
Continued advances in the reliability of IBM quantum processors bring them closer to industrial production standards
The other major launch associated with chips is the IBM Quantum Heron, the highest performance to date. In his third review, Heron presents the lowest median two-qubit gate errors yet: of his 176 possible two-qubit couplings, 57 of them have less than one error in every 1000 operations. These results reflect the continued advancement in the reliability of IBM’s quantum processors, bringing them closer to industrial production standards.
Equally important for workloads is the arrival of the high-performance software development kit, and the Qiskit open source SDK, which remains the preferred and highest-performing open source quantum SDK. The latest benchmark tests show that Qiskit SDK v2.2 is 83 times faster at transpilation than Tket 2.6.0, optimizing the integration between quantum processors and classic development environments.
The company estimates that the first cases of verified quantum advantage could be confirmed by the scientific community by the end of 2026. To encourage rigorous validation and promote joint progress towards the best quantum and classical approaches, IBM, Algorithmiq, Flatiron Institute and BlueQubit are contributing new results to an open, collaborative tracker designed to systematically monitor and verify emerging demonstrations of quantum advantage.
Qiskit news in quantum software
To achieve a verified quantum advantage over real hardware, developers need precise control of their circuits and access to classical high-performance computing (HPC) to mitigate the errors inherent in these systems. In this sense, the company has also announced that Qiskit, the highest-performance quantum software stack developed by IBM, offers developers more control than ever over their quantum processors.
IBM has expanded dynamic circuit capabilities, enabling a 24% increase in precision at scale beyond 100 qubits. The Blue giant has also expanded Qiskit with a new execution model that enables fine-grained control and a C-API, unlocking HPC-accelerated error mitigation capabilities, which reduce the cost of obtaining accurate results by more than 100 times.
Looking ahead to 2027, IBM plans to expand Qiskit with new computational libraries in areas such as machine learning and optimization, with the goal of more efficiently addressing fundamental challenges in physics and chemistry, including solving differential equations and simulating Hamiltonians on large-scale quantum processors.
Advances in fault-tolerant quantum computing
IBM maintains its forecast of having the first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. Along these lines, the company has introduced IBM Quantum Loon, a proof-of-concept processor that demonstrates many of the key components needed to implement quantum low-density parity check codes (qLDPC).
IBM has revealed the process behind its chips, all of which are manufactured from 300 mm wafers
Loon will validate a new architecture to implement and scale the components necessary for practical and highly efficient quantum error correction. The company has already showcased the innovative capabilities that will be built into Loon, including the introduction of multiple layers of high-quality, low-loss routing that enable longer on-chip connections (or “c-couplers”), overcoming neighbor couplers and physically linking distant qubits on the same chip, as well as technologies to reset qubits between calculations, all of which will enable more robust and stable processors.
Quantum wafer manufacturing with 300mm process
As IBM scales up its quantum computers, the company has announced that primary manufacturing of its quantum processor wafers is taking place at an advanced 300mm wafer manufacturing facility located at the Albany NanoTech Complex in New York.
As a novelty, IBM has revealed the process behind its chips: all of them manufactured from 300 mm wafers, incorporating the latest advances in technology and the experience of IBM Research. These processes double R&D speed for its latest chips by halving wafer processing time, all while producing a chip ten times more complex than any previously released.
To date, IBM has achieved the following milestones:
- Double the speed of research and development
- Reduce the manufacturing time of a new processor by at least half
- Increase the complexity of your quantum chips tenfold
- Allow multiple designs to be investigated and explored in parallel
