The Basque Government and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled the first IBM Quantum System Two in Europe at the IBM-Euskadi Quantum Computational Center in San Sebastián. The installation of this system marks a milestone in the partnership between the two parties, which began in 2023 within the framework of the BasQ - Basque Quantum initiative, promoted by the Basque Government to help make Euskadi an international hub for quantum technologies.

The system installed on the Ikerbasque Foundation's main campus, at the IBM-Euskadi Quantum Computational Center, was inaugurated at a ceremony featuring remarks from the President of the Basque Country Government, Mr. Imanol Pradales; Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research; Juan Ignacio Pérez Iglesias, Minister of Science, Universities, and Innovation of the Basque Government; Eider Mendoza, Deputy General of Gipuzkoa; Eneko Goia, the Mayor of San Sebastián; and Horacio Morell, General Manager of IBM Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel. The opening ceremony was also attended by, among others, the First and Second Vice-Lehendakari, Ibone Bengoetxea and Mikel Torres; and the Deputies General of Álava and Bizkaia, Ramiro González and Elixabete Etxanobe; in addition to representation from academia, government, and industry.

IBM and RIKEN, a national research laboratory in Japan, today unveiled the first IBM Quantum System Two ever to be deployed outside of the United States and beyond an IBM Quantum Data Center. The availability of this system also marks a milestone as the first quantum computer to be co-located with RIKEN's supercomputer Fugaku—one of the most powerful classical systems on Earth. This effort is supported by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), an organization under the jurisdiction of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI)'s "Development of Integrated Utilization Technology for Quantum and Supercomputers" as part of the "Project for Research and Development of Enhanced Infrastructures for Post 5G Information and Communications Systems."

IBM Quantum System Two at RIKEN is powered by IBM's 156-qubit IBM Quantum Heron, the company's best performing quantum processor to-date. IBM Heron's quality as measured by the two-qubit error rate, across a 100-qubit layered circuit, is 3x10-3 (with the best two-qubit error being 1x10-3)—which is 10 times better than the previous generation 127-qubit IBM Quantum Eagle. IBM Heron's speed, as measured by the CLOPS (circuit layer operations per second) metric is 250,000, which reflects another 10x improvement in the past year, over IBM Eagle.

The University of Tokyo (UTokyo) and IBM have announced plans to deploy the latest 156-qubit IBM Heron quantum processing unit (QPU), which will be operational in the IBM Quantum System One administered by UTokyo for the members of the Quantum Innovation Initiative (QII) Consortium. The IBM Heron QPU, which features a tunable-coupler architecture, delivers a significantly higher performance than the processor previously installed in 2023.

This is the second update of the IBM Quantum System One as part of the collaboration between UTokyo and IBM. It was first deployed with a 27-qubit IBM Falcon QPU, before being updated to a 127-qubit IBM Eagle QPU in 2023. It is now transitioning to the latest generation highly performant IBM Heron later this year. IBM has deployed four Heron-based systems worldwide and their performance shows significant improvement over the previous Eagle QPU, with a 3-4x improvement in two-qubit error rates; an order of magnitude improvement in device-wide performance benchmarked by errors across 100-qubit long layers; continued improvement in speed, with a 60 percent increase in CLOPS expected; and a system uptime of more than 95%. The latest IBM Heron processor has continued to demonstrate immense value in orchestrating utility-level workloads, to date, with multiple published studies leveraging these systems' capability of achieving more than 5,000 gate operations.

Today at its inaugural IBM Quantum Developer Conference, IBM announced quantum hardware and software advancements to execute complex algorithms on IBM quantum computers with record levels of scale, speed, and accuracy.

IBM Quantum Heron, the company's most performant quantum processor to-date and available in IBM's global quantum data centers, can now leverage Qiskit to accurately run certain classes of quantum circuits with up to 5,000 two-qubit gate operations. Users can now use these capabilities to expand explorations in how quantum computers can tackle scientific problems across materials, chemistry, life sciences, high-energy physics, and more.

Alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, senior European government officials and European-based global enterprises, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled the first IBM Quantum Data Center located outside of the United States. It is the company's second quantum data center in the world and marks a significant expansion of its fleet of advanced, utility-scale quantum systems available to global users via the cloud.

Now online in Ehningen, Germany, Europe's first IBM Quantum Data Center includes two new utility-scale, IBM Quantum Eagle-based systems, and will soon feature a new IBM Quantum Heron-based system. These systems are capable of performing computations beyond the brute-force simulation capabilities of classical computers.