The progress of Quantum Computing has significantly accelerated in recent years due to increased resources for research and development across the world. The focus has changed from just building quantum devices to establishing a quantum computing system including software and applications. An overview of the recent advancements of superconducting quantum computing systems is provided including the achievements made to scale processors to 127-qubit and scale up to 4000 qubits in 2025. Three key metrics are defined, scale, quality, and speed to holistically measure performance. The computational capabilities of today's quantum chips can be extended by adding classical resources using circuit knitting techniques to reach quantum advantage.
The progress of Quantum Computing has significantly accelerated in recent years due to increased resources for research and development across the world. The focus has changed from just building quantum devices to establishing a quantum computing system including software and applications. An overview of the recent advancements of superconducting quantum computing systems is provided including the achievements made to scale processors to 127-qubit and scale up to 4000 qubits in 2025. Three key metrics are defined, scale, quality, and speed to holistically measure performance. The computational capabilities of today's quantum chips can be extended by adding classical resources using circuit knitting techniques to reach quantum advantage.
The field of quantum computing has evolved into a large interdisciplinary community where significant resources are invested worldwide. As a result, accelerated progress is achieved and we are at the beginning of a new age of computation, developing programmable quantum systems towards universal quantum computers. Quantum computers promise to solve certain mathematical problems that are intractable to classical computers. Quantum computing systems are built from the bottom up reaching the limits of what can be classically simulated. The IBM Quantum Development Roadmap describes our vision of creating a quantum computing ecosystem delivering quantum applications through the cloud. This requires developing the entire quantum computing stack starting from the qubit and quantum processor technology, control electronics to software, algorithms and applications for quantum computing, implemented in the cloud and integrated with high performance computing. In this presentation the recent developments of our quantum computing systems and the scientific advances that enabled scaling superconducting quantum processors to 127 qubits are presented. Besides scale, also quality and speed will be discussed building the key metric for measuring the performance of quantum computation. Examples of applications where the computational power of quantum computing could make a difference are provided.
Quantum computing is an emerging computational paradigm that uses the principles of quantum mechanics, including superposition, entanglement, and quantum interference, to process information in fundamentally different ways from classical computers. During the last decade, quantum computing has progressed from theoretical research toward experimental and cloud-accessible systems. Recent developments have focused on increasing the number and quality of qubits, reducing gate errors, developing quantum error correction, improving quantum software, and integrating quantum processors with classical high-performance computing systems. Despite significant progress, practical large-scale quantum computing remains challenging because quantum states are extremely sensitive to environmental disturbances, resulting in decoherence and computational errors. Other challenges include limited qubit coherence time, gate fidelity, scalability, cryogenic requirements, quantum error correction overhead, hardware connectivity, programming complexity, and the difficulty of demonstrating useful quantum advantage for real-world applications. Recent developments from major research organizations indicate a shift from simply increasing physical qubit counts toward building reliable logical qubits and fault-tolerant quantum systems. Google has reported progress toward error-corrected logical qubits, while IBM\\\'s roadmap focuses on increasingly complex processors, modular architectures, quantum-classical integration, and fault-tolerant systems. Microsoft is pursuing a topological-qubit approach aimed at scalable quantum computing. This paper reviews the current state of quantum computing, examines major technological and scientific challenges, analyzes current research directions, and identifies future opportunities in drug discovery, materials science, optimization, cryptography, artificial intelligence, finance, and scientific simulation. The study concludes that the most realistic future is likely to involve quantum-centric computing, in which quantum processors work together with classical CPUs, GPUs, high-performance computing systems, and quantum networks rather than completely replacing classical computers.
Quantum Computing has inspired scientists as well as hardware and software developers and is fundamentally changing the landscape of information technology. Quantum computing systems are built from the bottom up reaching the limits of what can be classically simulated. The IBM Quantum Development Roadmap describes our vision of creating a quantum computing ecosystem delivering quantum applications through the cloud. This requires developing the entire quantum computing stack starting from the qubit and quantum processor technology, control electronics to software, algorithms and applications for quantum computing, implemented in the cloud and integrated with high performance computing. Though today's noisy near-term quantum computing systems are still limited, the roadmap targets to achieve an inflection point benefiting of continuous improvements across the stack driving quantum performance described by more qubits, higher quantum volume and speed.
There are signs that we are approaching a technical revolution that might take humankind’s computational capabilities to a new level. Quantum Computing leverages the principles of quantum mechanics, enabling the computational power to solve specific problems currently intractable for classical computers (e.g., cracking cryptographic keys). Since we are getting to a point where we can no longer build smaller, more powerful, more efficient devices with conventional methodologies, we need to think of new ways for technological progress. The manufacturing of microchips is reaching its limits in the use of traditional architectures. Hence, new and more advanced technologies need to address the challenges of increasing energy consumption and data processing. Connectivity, scalable architectures and concepts like Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service have already helped to scale computational-intense applications in the last years and have attracted the interest of IS researchers (e.g., Benlian et al. 2009 ; Benlian et al. 2018 ; Messerschmidt and Hinz 2013 ). Looking ahead to the next generation, computing will comprise technologies that enable high-performance applications far beyond today’s possibilities. One prominent example with a disruptive potential is Quantum Computing. While there are abundant open questions and directions for further developments, researchers in this area have made substantial progress in the last decade, indicating that, after medical imaging, lasers, and superconductors, another quantum-technological innovation might be approaching. We, therefore, intend to provide an overview of the current state of Quantum Computing research and outline how this new technology might stimulate research in Information Systems.
Quantum computing continues to make great progress, impacting not only the theory of computer science but also technological innovations. This chapter gives an overview of the subject matter, presenting the current state-of-the-art in qubit architectures, quantum algorithms, hardware achievements made since 2019 through 2024, potential applications, and difficulties ahead for wide-scale implementation. Utilizing the latest results of research and innovation efforts conducted by top industry leaders, the chapter covers topics such as the comparison of superconducting, trapped ion, neutral atom, photonic, and topological qubits, quantum algorithms, applicability in various industries like cryptography, optimization, material sciences, and artificial intelligence, and the advancement of quantum error correction and fault-tolerant computing. Finally, the chapter takes a closer look at prevalent myths associated with near-term quantum advantage and focuses on true developments in quantum hardware and logical qubits.
Superconducting quantum computing (SQC) has achieved remarkable progress in recent years, garnering significant scientific and technological interests. This review provides a concise overview of the historical development of SQC, detailing fabrication methodologies for superconducting quantum chips and implementations of quantum gate operations. It compiles experimental progress in SQC over the past few years, including the preparation of multi-qubit entangled states, random circuit sampling experiments, demonstrations of quantum error correction based on surface codes, error mitigation techniques and quantum simulations. This review also discusses experimental progress related to boson-encoded qubits, fluxoniums and qudits. Finally, the current challenges in scaling are analyzed, and potential solutions for addressing these limitations are explored.