IBM Ships Nighthawk r2, a 120-Qubit Processor 25× Faster at Circuit Execution

IBM announced broad availability of Nighthawk r2 on the IBM Quantum Platform, a 120-qubit processor with 218 next-generation tunable couplers and a new dissipative reset system that lets it execute over 100,000 quantum circuits per second — 25 times the throughput of IBM's Heron fleet — while holding comparable gate accuracy. The chip has already run circuits with more than 7,500 gates, a milestone on IBM's 2026 quantum roadmap, by resolving the qubit-reset bottleneck that had throttled computational throughput on earlier IBM processors.