IBM's Quantum Advantage Claim and the 37.3-Minute Reply

By Alius Noreika

Key takeaways

• IBM and the University of Chicago announced on 30 July 2026 that they had run a computation beyond the practical reach of leading classical methods while certifying how faithfully it was executed.
• The experiment used 70 data qubits and 27 ancillas, 97 physical qubits in total, running a depth-70 circuit containing 468 T gates on IBM’s Boston processor.
• Only about one run in 1,700 survived the error checks, which yielded 2,051 usable samples in 16.1 minutes and a certified fidelity floor of 0.284 at 95% confidence.
• On 13 August a team at Singapore University of Technology and Design computed exact amplitudes for all 2,051 of IBM’s published outputs in 37.3 minutes on 256 NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
• IBM had opened the challenge on its public Quantum Advantage Tracker on 9 July, three weeks before the announcement, precisely so that this kind of response could happen.

The claim, and the answer that arrived two weeks later

Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research, made the headline claim himself: “We are now firmly in the quantum advantage era.” He was announcing a joint experiment with the University of Chicago in which an IBM processor completed a sampling task that leading classical simulation methods could not practically reproduce, and in which the researchers could also put a statistical floor under how accurately the machine had done it.