Topic
Progress toward logical qubits and error-corrected quantum computation, including gate fidelity and error-rate targets.
Amazon, IBM and the White House expect the first fault-tolerant quantum computers around 2028 or 2029, a timeline that has shortened in recent years. Investors have followed, pushing IonQ up more than 300% since 2024, well before any fault-tolerant machine exists.
Reality
DARPA moved four quantum firms, Atom Computing, Diraq, IBM and IonQ, into the final stage of its benchmarking programme, joining Microsoft and PsiQuantum. Buyers hearing quantum pitches now get a government check of six designs against a 2033 goal of a machine worth more than it costs.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishersReality
The 0.02% timing overhead comes from IonQ's own simulations of 88 memory blocks and magic factories, posted to arXiv. For anyone working through a cryptographic inventory, the readiness deadlines stand where they were.
Reality
IonQ researchers report a real-time error-correction decoder that added under 0.3% to runtime at a CNOT error rate of 10^-4, and under 12% at five times that rate, on workloads simulated against the company's own proposed architecture.
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The Quantum Genesis Q Competition asks companies for machines that run hundreds of millions of fault-tolerant operations on at least 100 logical qubits, and $200 million of the $215 million sits in prize pools.
Reality
The Sandia-led QUOPS benchmark rates a quantum computer by the largest useful circuit it can finish and how fast it finishes it. Across Google, IBM and Quantinuum machines the best score was 1,824, against a chemistry target of 250 million.
Reality
CUDA-Q Logical lets researchers swap error-correction codes and hardware architectures and recompute the resource estimate. Sandia's QUOPS benchmark for logical-qubit readiness now reaches the industry through NVIDIA's platform.
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Nvidia's CUDA-Q Logical simulates logical qubits, error-correction codes and QPU architectures side by side. The two customer results it launched with come from an architecture startup and a national lab, and both are models.
Reality
Superion 256 opens for orders with deliveries due in 2027. The six tapeouts IonQ ran in half a year say more about whether its 2028 fault-tolerance date is real than the qubit count does.
Reality
The 26-day figure is a runtime rather than a date, and it works out to one logical Toffoli every 57.6 milliseconds on trapped-ion hardware whose scale IonQ's roadmap does not reach until 2028. No error rates are published to check it.
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IBM has closed the HRL Laboratories deal behind a 2029 fault-tolerant target. For anyone holding ciphertext that must outlive the decade, the vendor's date is now the planning date.
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UC Davis researchers report in PRX Quantum a way to simulate noisy, high-fidelity magic-state preparation at polynomial cost. Error budgets can be tested rather than assumed.
Reality
The trapped-ion company signed a joint development deal with contract manufacturer Quanta Computer for hardware infrastructure. No new processor, no volumes, no timetable, and that is the tell.
Reality