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IBM Quantum Starling, expected to be the world’ s first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum system, will be built in the new IBM Quantum Data Center in Poughkeepsie, New York and delivered to clients in 2029.

In June 2025, IBM unveiled its path to build IBM Quantum Starling, depicted in the rendering above. Starling will be the world’ s first large-scale, faulttolerant quantum system.

Delivered by 2029, IBM Quantum Starling 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( 1048) 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, faulttolerant quantum computer – one that will solve realworld challenges and unlock immense possibilities for business."

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.

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.

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. Until today, a clear path to building such a fault-tolerant system without unrealistic engineering overhead has not been published.

The path to large-scale fault tolerance

The success of executing an efficient fault-tolerant architecture is dependent on the choice of its errorcorrecting code, and how the system is designed and built to enable this code to scale.

Alternative and previous gold-standard, errorcorrecting codes present fundamental engineering challenges. To scale, they would require an unfeasible number of physical qubits to create enough logical

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