Are useful and error-free quantum computers only two years away?
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- QuEra says its Libra fault-tolerant quantum computer is slated to arrive in 2028 and be available through the cloud via a collaboration with Amazon Web Services.
- Libra will contain 10,000–15,000 laser-controlled neutral-atom qubits partitioned into 256 logical qubits, each committing an error only once in a million operations, enabling roughly 1 million operations total.
- Yuval Boger of QuEra says the firm is running five experimental machines to perfect different engineering challenges and that the balance has tipped from "90% science to 10% engineering" toward more engineering.
- The technical gap is steep: the largest existing neutral-atom array holds 6,100 qubits (none yet used for computation), and the most error-corrected logical qubits demonstrated so far is 48.
- IBM projects it will offer fault-tolerant quantum computers starting in 2029, while Thomas Wong at Creighton University says QuEra could "overshoot it by a couple of years or more."
- Joe Fitzsimons of Horizon Quantum Computing calls the plan ambitious but credits QuEra with a strong track record on error-correction breakthroughs, while Wong argues Libra is more likely a "discovery machine" than a launchpad for game-changing applications.
Why it matters: QuEra's 2028 target puts it a year ahead of IBM's projected 2029 fault-tolerant offering, and if delivered, would vault the field from today's 48-logical-qubit record to 256 — giving AWS customers first cloud access to quantum simulations in physics and materials science beyond classical computers' reach.
