IBM aims for a 1,040-qubit quantum machine by 2027
· BehindLines newsroom
IBM states, in a press release dated 11 November 2026, that its future quantum processor Nighthawk r3 will be designed to execute 10,000 quantum operations on 520 qubits. According to that release, which was republished by HPCwire and is therefore not an independent source, the company plans in 2027 to link two of these chips into a single 1,040-qubit system. This is a roadmap plan, not a machine already delivered.
What already exists
The current generation, Nighthawk r2, introduced in September, handles up to 100,000 samples per second and performs more than 7,500 operations on 120 qubits, IBM says. Also according to IBM, customers and partners such as E.ON, Algorithmiq and Q-CTRL ran 34 billion circuits on it and report improvements of up to 19 times. E.ON cites a 15-fold gain, compared with earlier work on IBM's Heron processor, for a quantum machine learning calculation linked to power-grid optimization. These figures are those of the company and its partners, as reported by the company.
Linking several chips
According to IBM, the r3 is to have 520 programmable qubits, out of 2,034 physical qubits in total, and 10 chip-to-chip couplers, called "l-couplers", designed to assemble processors into larger systems. IBM says it has already linked Nighthawk r1 processors with four l-couplers, with a quantum state transfer fidelity of 99.3%, against a target of 99.9%. The company also says it joined two cryogenic modules to form one system, reaching cooling below 15 millikelvin in under five days.
Quantum and classical computing
According to IBM, its platform combines quantum and classical resources, including high-performance computing, in one managed environment. With RIKEN, the company says its sample-based quantum diagonalization workflow ran about 5 times faster, with 100 times the computation of the original study. It also writes that, as quantum workloads grow, they will call for more classical resources to handle errors.
What to keep in mind
Everything above comes from IBM: HPCwire merely republished the company's release. The 1,040-qubit system is a goal for 2027, and the results cited are those of IBM and its partners, as reported by IBM; nothing here is independently confirmed.