By Aman Gupta
Publication Date: 2025-11-21 11:05:00
IBM and Cisco will collaborate to build a network of large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers, aiming for an initial multi-system demonstration within five years and targeting broader networking in the early 2030s.
The companies describe a distributed architecture designed to unite individual fault-tolerant machines to run computations “over tens to hundreds of thousands of qubits,” advancing IBM’s roadmap toward large-scale systems later this decade.
IBM outlined the core technical hurdle as converting stationary qubits into microwave “flying” qubits and then to optical signals for fiber transport, requiring high-efficiency microwave-optical transducers and new quantum networking units.
IBM also said it is working with the SQMS Center at Fermilab on entangling quantum systems over a microwave network as part of the path to distributed quantum computing. Separately, IBM reaffirmed its goal to deliver a fault-tolerant system by…