IBM said Wednesday it plans to connect two next-generation Nighthawk r3 quantum processors into a single system of more than 1,000 qubits in 2027, as it updated its public roadmap at its Quantum Developer's Conference^1,2.

The company said Nighthawk r3 is designed to run 10,000 quantum operations on 520 programmable qubits, with 2,034 physical qubits, retaining square-lattice connectivity from the current generation while adding 10 chip-to-chip links it calls l-couplers². Linking two r3 chips would yield a 1,040-qubit system, IBM said².

Ars Technica reported that IBM is expanding Nighthawk toward more than 500 programmable qubits while scaling back a plan to link nine Nighthawk processors to two, and that the total qubit count planned for next year is unchanged¹. IBM's release does not describe a nine-processor target².

Nighthawk started at 120 hardware qubits with about 5,000 gate operations before errors become too likely, Ars said, and an earlier 2027 plan kept that qubit count while aiming for 10,000 gates¹. IBM said the September Nighthawk r2 generation supports more than 7,500 operations on 120 qubits and up to 100,000 samples per second, citing hardware qubit resets^1,2.

IBM said clients and partners including E.ON, Algorithmiq and Q-CTRL have executed more than 34 billion circuits on r2 and reported speedups of up to 19 times versus earlier IBM processors, figures that have not been independently audited in these accounts². Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research, said useful quantum computing depends on delivering results with accuracy and speed².

IBM said it connected Nighthawk r1 processors with four l-couplers this year at 99.3 percent quantum state transfer fidelity, toward a 99.9 percent target, and linked two cryogenic modules into one system². Those steps are company demonstrations, not a completed 2027 machine². IBM also described bringing classical high-performance computing onto the IBM Quantum Platform; r3 itself was presented as a design, not a shipped chip².