IBM's Newest Quantum Chip Runs 25 Times as Many Circuits per Second as Its Predecessor

IBM released Nighthawk r2, a 120-qubit quantum processor, on Aug. 31, 2026, and made it available to users on IBM Quantum Platform. The company says it executes more than 100,000 circuits per second, about 25 times the rate of its current Heron fleet, which IBM puts at roughly 4,000 circuits per second.

The speed gain comes from a change in how the chip prepares its qubits between runs. Previous IBM processors relied on conditional reset, which measures a qubit's state and flips it if needed, but that method fails for qubits that drift outside the computational state, leaving the system idle for hundreds of microseconds. Nighthawk r2 replaces that wait with a dissipative reset gadget: each of the 120 programmable qubits is coupled to a cold environment that pulls it back to its ground state on demand. IBM says this drops a qubit's effective T1, the time it holds its energy, from a median of about 200 microseconds to roughly 25 nanoseconds.

IBM reports around a 25x reduction in initialization error across the device, with gate fidelity matching its Heron processors and reset that leaves neighboring qubits undisturbed. The processor contains 458 physical quantum elements in total: 120 programmable qubits, 218 couplers and 120 reset elements, one paired with each qubit.

IBM says Nighthawk r2 has demonstrated accurate results on circuits containing more than 7,500 gates, a target the company lists on its 2026 quantum roadmap. In neutron-scattering simulations reported earlier this year, IBM says the chip's higher throughput enabled a 12x speedup over previous runs. The company also says early tests on circuits it describes as advantage candidates point to as much as 10x faster runtimes with no loss in accuracy.

All performance figures are IBM's own measurements on IBM hardware; no independent evaluation of Nighthawk r2's claims has been published.