Updating my top 10 quantum computer leaderboard
We had a new 98 qubit system announcement this week. Does the Quantinuum Helios system even make the top 10 leaderboard?
Back in July, which feels like a long time ago with the pace of quantum industry press releases, I produced a top-10 quantum computer leaderboard to catalog the leading systems in operation [1]. Some of these builds are prototypes or experimental, but they collectively demonstrate what is currently possible. In that list, I limited inclusion to universal gate-based physical-qubit systems and excluded quantum annealers such as D-Wave. That decision keeps the leaderboard consistent over time and maintains its focus on systems theoretically capable of running universal algorithms like Shor’s. To be clear about that distinction, Shor’s algorithm requires precise quantum gate operations, superposition control, and quantum Fourier transforms. To the best of my understanding those are all features of gate-based or circuit-model quantum computing. Annealers like D-Wave are building don’t execute quantum circuits or logical qubit sequences, so they lack the computational primitives necessary for modular exponentiation and the quantum Fourier transform at the core of Shor’s.
Recently, Quantinuum announced its new Helios system [2]. Because my leaderboard ranks systems by physical-qubit count for universal gate-based architectures, Helios does not displace any of the top 10. Its 98 physical qubits fall below the lowest entries on the list, each of which has 105 or more. They do have a system on the roadmap for 2027 that is targeting 192 physical qubits which will put them into the top 10 systems on the leaderboard [3]. We should see a lot of movement in the top 10 quantum computers by universal gate-based physical qubits in the next few years. All of these advancements are pushing these systems toward the line where running Shor’s algorithm will be something that happens on a regular basis.
Top 10 quantum computers by universal gate-based physical qubits:
Atom Computing - 1,180 qubits (October 24, 2023) United States
IBM Condor - 1,121 qubits (December 4, 2023) United States
CAS Xiaohong - 504 qubits (December 6, 2024) China
IBM Osprey - 433 qubits (November 9, 2022) United States
Fujitsu & RIKEN - 256 qubits (April 22, 2025) Japan
Xanadu Borealis - 216 qubits (June 1, 2022) Canada
IBM Heron R2 - 156 qubits (November 13, 2024) United States
IBM Eagle - 127 qubits (November 16, 2021) United States
Google Willow - 105 qubits (December 9, 2024) United States
USTC Zuchongzhi 3.0 - 105 qubits (March 3, 2025) China
However, the focus on logical qubits in the Quantinuum announcement signals a shift in how useful “largest” might be measured in the near future. I may need to make a new list focusing on logical qubits. That is something I’m going to evaluate tomorrow. Not only does my decision reconcile the awareness that “largest” can mean many things (logical qubits, coherence, error correction), but also it allows me to maintain my focus on maintaining a consistent and measurable longitudinal benchmark.
Footnotes:
[1] Lindahl, N. (2025, July 4). The top 10 quantum computer leaderboard. The Lindahl Letter.
[2] Bousquette, I. (2025, November 5). The next big quantum computer has arrived. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-big-quantum-computer-has-arrived-c1053c2a
[3] Quantinuum. (2024, September 10). Quantinuum unveils accelerated roadmap to achieve universal fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2030. https://www.quantinuum.com/press-releases/quantinuum-unveils-accelerated-roadmap-to-achieve-universal-fault-tolerant-quantum-computing-by-2030