IBM Plans to Link Two Quantum Chips into 1,040-Qubit System by 2027

IBM announced plans in November 2026 to connect two next-generation Nighthawk r3 processors into a single system containing more than 1,000 qubits by the year 2027. The new chip is engineered to execute up to 10,000 quantum operations across its 520 usable qubits and features ten connectors designed for linking multiple units together. Industry partners have reported achieving speed improvements of up to 19 times on current Nighthawk chips compared to earlier models like Heron. While IBM aims to reach a fault-tolerant state with an error-corrected computer named Starling by 2029, the company is currently focusing on scaling general-purpose processors for immediate use cases such as optimizing power grids and running billions of program simulations.