IBM to build first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer

Trade Arabia

10-06-2025

IBM unveiled its path to build the world's first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer, setting the stage for practical and scalable quantum computing.
Delivered by 2029, IBM Quantum Starling will be built in a new IBM Quantum Data Center in Poughkeepsie, New York and is expected to perform 20,000 times more operations than today's quantum computers.
To represent the computational state of an IBM Starling would require the memory of more than a quindecillion (10^48) of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
With Starling, users will be able to fully explore the complexity of its quantum states, which are beyond the limited properties able to be accessed by current quantum computers.
IBM, which already operates a large, global fleet of quantum computers, is releasing a new Quantum Roadmap that outlines its plans to build out a practical, fault-tolerant quantum computer.
"IBM is charting the next frontier in quantum computing," said Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO, IBM.
"Our expertise across mathematics, physics, and engineering is paving the way for a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer — one that will solve real-world challenges and unlock immense possibilities for business," he noted.
A large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer with hundreds or thousands of logical qubits could run hundreds of millions to billions of operations, which could accelerate time and cost efficiencies in fields such as drug development, materials discovery, chemistry, and optimization.
According to IBM, the Starling will be able to access the computational power required for these problems by running 100 million quantum operations using 200 logical qubits.
It will be the foundation for IBM Quantum Blue Jay, which will be capable of executing 1 billion quantum operations over 2,000 logical qubits.
A logical qubit is a unit of an error-corrected quantum computer tasked with storing one qubit's worth of quantum information. It is made from multiple physical qubits working together to store this information and monitor each other for errors, it stated.
Like classical computers, quantum computers need to be error corrected to run large workloads without faults. To do so, clusters of physical qubits are used to create a smaller number of logical qubits with lower error rates than the underlying physical qubits.
Logical qubit error rates are suppressed exponentially with the size of the cluster, enabling them to run greater numbers of operations.
Creating increasing numbers of logical qubits capable of executing quantum circuits, with as few physical qubits as possible, is critical to quantum computing at scale, said the statement from IBM.
Until today, a clear path to building such a fault-tolerant system without unrealistic engineering overhead has not been published.
According to IBM, a practical, large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer requires an architecture that is:
*Fault-tolerant to suppress enough errors for useful algorithms to succeed.
*Able to prepare and measure logical qubits through computation.
*Capable of applying universal instructions to these logical qubits.
*Able to decode measurements from logical qubits in real-time and can alter subsequent instructions.
*Modular to scale to hundreds or thousands of logical qubits to run more complex algorithms.
*Efficient enough to execute meaningful algorithms with realistic physical resources, such as energy and infrastructure.
Today, IBM is introducing two new technical papers that detail how it will solve the above criteria to build a large-scale, fault-tolerant architecture.
The first paper unveils how such a system will process instructions and run operations effectively with qLDPC codes, while the second one describes how to efficiently decode the information from the physical qubits and charts a path to identify and correct errors in real-time with conventional computing resources.