Signal Quantum Computing Race 2026: IBM Nighthawk, Google Willow, Microsoft Majorana 1

Summary

IBM unveiled its Quantum Nighthawk processor at its November 2025 Quantum Developer Conference, featuring 120 qubits connected by 218 next-generation tunable couplers in a new square-lattice topology, over 20% more couplers than its predecessor Heron. Nighthawk supports circuits with up to 5,000 two-qubit gates, a figure IBM expects to raise to 7,500 in 2026 and 10,000 by 2027 without increasing qubit count, and the chip is slated for commercial availability by the end of 2025. Alongside it, IBM introduced the experimental Quantum Loon processor as a testbed for scalable quantum error correction using a qLDPC code scheme, and separately achieved a decoding milestone of under 480 nanoseconds using classical hardware, a tenfold speedup over prior approaches, reached about a year ahead of schedule. IBM targets verified quantum advantage by the end of 2026 and fault-tolerant quantum computing (its planned Starling system, running 100 million gates on 200 logical qubits) by 2029. Google's Willow and Microsoft's Majorana 1 represent competing architectural approaches in the same race, though this search did not surface additional new specifics on those two systems beyond what was already known.