Computing · November 2025

IBM Nighthawk and Loon

IBM shows every hardware piece a fault-tolerant machine will need.

IBM unveiled Nighthawk, a 120-qubit processor with 218 tunable couplers able to run 5,000 two-qubit gates, and Loon, an experimental chip containing every element needed for fault tolerance. It also decoded qLDPC error-correcting codes in real time, under 480 nanoseconds.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia Source

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Superconducting qubit 1999
Quantum error correction 1995

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Selected gate-model quantum processors Latest: 1.12k physical qubits (2023) Source: Wikipedia: Timeline of quantum computing and communication; Wikipedia: List of quantum processors