YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY, November 11, 2026 — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced IBM Quantum Nighthawk r3, its next-generation processor, will be built to accurately execute 10,000 quantum operations across 520 qubits to tackle larger, more complex problems while maintaining the speed and quality demonstrated by the current generation Nighthawk available today.
In 2027, IBM plans to link two Nighthawk r3 processors into a single system with more than 1,000 qubits.
To be at the frontier of quantum computing, industry-relevant applications demand both computational quality and speed. Speed matters because a quantum computer delivers its answer in samples: each run of a quantum circuit returns one result. Applications increasingly require circuits executing thousands of quantum operations on approximately 100 qubits or more, generating millions to billions of samples. Scale and quality enable increasingly complex computations, but speed determines whether these demanding workloads can be completed in practical timeframes and at a reasonable cost.
