IBM Quantum Nighthawk r2 hits 100,000 circuits per second—25x faster than Heron

IBM's new Nighthawk r2 processor executes over 100,000 circuits per second—25x the throughput of Heron—thanks to a dissipative reset gadget that actively cools qubits to their ground state. It maintains Heron-class gate fidelity while cutting initialization error by 25x, and supports mid-circuit reset for quantum error correction research. With 120 qubits and 458 physical elements, it has already demonstrated accurate results on 7,500-gate circuits, marking a 2026 roadmap milestone.