Introducing Helios: The Most Accurate Quantum Computer in the World
We’re pleased to introduce Helios, a technological marvel redefining the possible.
Building on its predecessor H2, which has already breached quantum advantage, Helios nearly doubles the qubit count and surpasses H2’s industry-leading fidelity, pushing further into the quantum advantage regime than any system before it. With unprecedented capability across its full stack, Helios is the most powerful quantum computer in the world.
“Helios is a true marvel—a seamless fusion of hardware and software, creating a platform for discovery unlike any other.”- Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, CEO
Helios’ groundbreaking design and advanced software stack bring quantum programming closer than ever to the ease and flexibility of classical computing—positioning Helios to accelerate commercial adoption. Even before its public debut, Helios had already demonstrated its capabilities as the world’s first enterprise-grade quantum computer. During a two-month early access program, select partners including SoftBank Corp. and JPMorgan Chase conducted commercially relevant research. We also leveraged Helios to perform large-scale simulations in high-temperature superconductivity and quantum magnetism—both with clear pathways to real-world industry applications.
Helios is now available to all customers through our cloud service and on-premise offering, including an option to integrate with NVIDIA GB200 for applications targeting specific end markets.
A Stellar Quantum Computer
“You would need to harvest every star in the universe to power a classical machine that could do the same calculations we did with Helios."
- Dr. Anthony Ransford, Helios Lead Architect
As we detailed in a benchmarking paper, Helios sets a new standard for quantum computing performance with the highest fidelity ever released to the market. It features 98 fully connected physical qubits with single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.9975% and two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.921% across all qubit pairs—making it the most accurate commercial quantum computer in the world.
Our fidelity shines in system-level benchmarks, such as Random Circuit Sampling (RCS), famously used by Google to demonstrate quantum supremacy when it performed an RCS task that would take a classical computer “10 septillion years” to replicate. Now, RCS serves as both a benchmark and the minimum standard for serious competitors in the market. Frequently missed in this conversation, however, is the importance of fidelity, or accuracy. That's why, when benchmarking Helios using RCS, we report the fidelity achieved by Helios on circuits of varying complexity (with complexity quantified by power requirements for classical simulation).
Our results show a classical supercomputer would require more power than the Sun—or, in fact, the combined power of all stars in the visible universe—to complete the same task in the same amount of time. In contrast, Helios achieved it using roughly the power of a single data center rack.
Like its predecessors, H1 and H2, Helios is designed to improve fidelity and overall system performance over time while sustaining competitive leadership through the launch of its successor.
Qubits at a Crossroads
"When I first saw the rotatable ion storage ring with a junction and gating legs sketched on a napkin, I loved the idea for its simplicity and efficiency. Seeing it finally realized after all of the team’s hard work has been truly incredible."
- Dr. John Gaebler, Fellow and Chief Scientist, Quantinuum
The Helios ion trap uses tiny currents to generate electromagnetic fields that hold single atomic ions (qubits) hovering above the trap for computation. We introduced a first-of-its-kind “junction”, which acts like a traffic intersection for qubits, enabling efficient routing and improved reliability. This is not only the first commercial implementation of this engineering triumph but it also allows our QCCD (Quantum Charged Coupled Device) architecture to scale, with future systems featuring hundreds of junctions arranged like a city street grid.
Whereas predecessor systems routed qubits using “physical swaps,” requiring sequential sorting, cooling, and gating that prevented parallel operations, the Helios QPU instead resembles a classical architecture with dedicated memory, cache, and computational zones. Like a spinning hard drive, the Helios QPU rotates qubits through ring storage (memory), passes them through the junction into the cache, moves them to logic zones for gating, and moves them to the leg storage while the next batch is processed. Sorting can now be done in parallel with cooling operations, resulting in a processor that is faster and less error prone. This parallelism will become a hallmark of Quantinuum’s future generations, enabling faster operating speeds.
Animation: This triumph of engineering demonstrates exquisite control over some of nature’s smallest particles in a way the world has never seen; one colleague likened the ions to a “little marching band.”
Quantinuum’s QCCD provides full all-to-all connectivity, giving the Helios QPU significant advantages over “fixed qubit” architectures, such as those used in superconducting systems. Its ability to physically move qubits around and entangle any qubit with any other qubit enables algorithms and error-correcting codes that are functionally impossible for fixed qubit architectures.
We made another “tiny” but significant change: we switched our qubits from ytterbium to barium. Whereas ytterbium largely relied on ultraviolet lasers that are expensive and hard on other components, barium can be manipulated with lasers in the visible part of the spectrum, where mature industrial technology exists, providing a more affordable, reliable and scalable commercial solution.
Barium also naturally allows the quantum computer to detect and remove a certain type of error, known as leakage, at the atomic level. By addressing this error directly, programmers can enhance the performance of their computation.
Delivered on Time – in Real Time
As announced earlier this year, Helios launched with a completely new stack equipped with a new software environment that makes quantum programming feel as intuitive as classical development.
Our new stack also features a real-time engine that massively improves our capability. With a real-time control system, we are evolving from static, pre-planned circuits to dynamic quantum programs that respond to results on the fly. We can now, for the first time on a quantum computer, interleave GPU-accelerated classical and quantum computations in a single program.
Our real-time engine also means we have dynamic transport – routing qubits as the moment demands reduces time to solution and diminishes the impact of memory errors.
Programmers can now use our new quantum programming language, Guppy, to write dynamic circuits that were previously impossible. By combining Guppy with our real-time engine, developers can leverage arbitrary control flow driven by quantum measurements, as well as full classical computation—including loops, higher-order functions, early exits, and dynamic qubit allocation. Far from being mere conveniences, these capabilities are essential stepping stones toward achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing at scale—putting us decisively ahead of the competition.
Fully compatible with industry standards like QIR and tools such as NVIDIA CUDA-Q, Helios bridges classical and quantum computing more seamlessly than ever, making hybrid quantum-classical development simple, natural, and accessible, and establishing Helios as the most programmable, general-purpose quantum computer ever built.
The Most Logical Path to Fault Tolerance
While everyone else is promising fault-tolerance, we’re delivering it. We are the only company to demonstrate a fully universal fault-tolerant gate set, we’ve demonstrated more codes than anyone else, and our logical fidelities are the best in class.
Now, with 98 physical qubits, we’ve been able to make 94 logical qubits, fully entangled in one of the largest GHZ states ever recorded. We did this with better than break-even fidelity, meaning they outperform physical qubits running the same algorithm. Built on our Iceberg code, published last year in Nature Physics, these logical qubits achieve the industry’s highest encoding efficiency, needing only two ancilla qubits per code block, or roughly a 1:1 physical-to-logical qubit ratio.
With 50 error-detected logical qubits, Helios achieved better than break-even performance, running the largest encoded simulation of quantum magnetism to date—an exceptional example of how users can leverage efficient encodings. This range and flexibility let users tailor the encoding rate to their application: fewer logical qubits deliver higher fidelity for less complex tasks, while larger sets enable more complex simulations.
Helios also produced 48 fully error-corrected logical qubits at a remarkable 2:1 encoding rate, a ratio thought impossible just a few years ago. This super high encoding rate stands in stark contrast to other notable demonstrations from industry peers. For example, the demonstration linked in the previous sentence would need a whopping 4800 qubits to make 48 logical qubits. Our 2:1 encoding rate was achieved through a clever technique called code concatenation, a breakthrough that supports single-shot error correction, transversal logic, and full parallelization—all at 99.99% state preparation and measurement fidelity.
To extend this performance at scale, all future Quantinuum systems—starting with Helios—will integrate real-time decoding using NVIDIA Grace Hopper GPUs, treating decoding as a dynamic computational process rather than a static lookup. Errors can be corrected as computations run without slowing the logical clock rate. Combined with Guppy, NVIDIA CUDA-Q, and NVQLink, this infrastructure forms the foundation for fault-tolerant, real-time quantum computation, delivering immediate quantum advantage in the near term and a clear path to scalable error-corrected computing.
We remain the only company to perform a fully universal fault-tolerant gate set, with more error-correcting codes and higher logical fidelities than any other company.
Helios is ready to drive practical, commercial quantum applications across industries. Its unprecedented fidelity, scalability, and programmability give users the tools to tackle problems that were previously out of reach. This is just the beginning, and we look forward to seeing what users and companies will achieve with it.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, pioneers powerful quantum computers and advanced software solutions. Quantinuum’s technology drives breakthroughs in materials discovery, cybersecurity, and next-gen quantum AI. With over 500 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, Quantinuum leads the quantum computing revolution across continents.
Thirty participants gathered at Newnham College, Cambridge, for an intensive five-day programme exploring how quantum computers can be used to model chemical systems.
By: Duncan Gowland, Senior Advanced R&D Scientist at Quantinuum
For 30 researchers who gathered at Newnham College, Cambridge this September, that question shaped an intensive five-day programme.
Quantinuum’s first InQuanto Summer School, supported by the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), combined lectures, hands-on workshops, and mini-projects to help participants connect fundamental concepts with practical research. By the end of the week, participants were applying those ideas to problems ranging from molecular electronic structure to quantum state-preparation circuits.
Applying quantum computing to chemistry can be challenging because it draws on expertise from a broad range of areas, including electronic structure theory, quantum algorithms, software, hardware, noise modelling, and resource estimation. Researchers often enter the field with deep knowledge of one or two of these areas but less familiarity with the others.
A key objective of the course was to help researchers from computational chemistry and quantum computing build stronger foundations, develop a shared language, and deepen their understanding of adjacent disciplines.
For researchers beginning work at this intersection, that shared understanding can make it easier to identify where to start, which assumptions to challenge, and when to seek expertise from another discipline.
Bringing Theory and Practice Together
The programme began with lectures on the foundations of quantum computing, followed by pen-and-paper and computational exercises in the afternoon. On Day 2, lectures and workshops introduced the electronic structure problem: how quantum chemists describe the behaviour of electrons in molecules.
Students then brought these two foundations together by studying fermion-to-qubit mappings, which translate chemistry problems into a form that quantum computers can process, before moving on to the measurement of chemistry observables and the construction of quantum algorithms.
Learners were given free access to InQuanto, Quantinuum’s quantum chemistry software platform designed to accelerate research in fields such as chemistry and condensed matter physics using quantum computers. InQuanto supported the lectures as a broad, well-documented, and thoroughly tested platform that enabled students to explore and reinforce complex concepts through hands-on experience.
Later in the week, attention shifted to state-of-the-art considerations: how to build useful chemical models, make the best use of current quantum devices, and think about how quantum algorithms for chemistry might develop over the next five to ten years.
The students, who travelled from around the world to Cambridge, brought a remarkable range of backgrounds and experience. The material was pitched at roughly first-year doctoral level, for participants with at least a year of experience in one core area and some Python skills. Even with this experience, participants benefited from exposure to other disciplines and from the practical expertise of Quantinuum’s quantum chemistry team—which brings years of experience working with industrial including BMW Group, TotalEnergies, NVIDIA, and Pfizer.
Throughout the week, participants were highly engaged in lectures and brought a thoughtful, collaborative approach to the workshop exercises. Discussions continued throughout the week, from coffee breaks to lunches and dinners, creating valuable opportunities to exchange ideas and experiences.
A particular highlight was the mini-project work. In just a day and a half, participants tackled a wide range of problems and produced impressive prototype solutions. The projects concluded with a poster-style session, where the quality of discussion was exceptional. Examples included state-preparation programmes using mid-circuit measurement in Guppy; investigations of active-space selection and quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) for the chromium dimer; and the use of the atomic valence active space (AVAS) approach to identify active spaces and perform resource estimation for myoglobin.
One participant reimplemented their research on efficient state-preparation circuits based on orbital entanglement in InQuanto and compared the performance of those circuits with the platform’s efficient ansatz methods on the Helios emulator. It was rewarding to see participants apply these tools to their own research challenges and explore new approaches to quantum chemistry.
With Support from the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre
This rewarding week was made possible through the support of the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre, whose partnership helped bring the programme to life, and by the contributions of colleagues across Quantinuum. The teaching team brought together experts from our quantum chemistry, compiler, and error-correction teams, who developed the course materials, delivered lectures, and led the workshops.
Above all, the programme demonstrated the value of bringing researchers together around a shared foundation, practical tools, and opportunities to learn from one another. We look forward to seeing how participants build on these ideas in their future research.
Interested in future training opportunities, workshops, and community events from Quantinuum? Join QNET to stay connected with the latest updates, resources, and opportunities to engage with the quantum computing community.
For years, the quantum landscape has been crowded with headline hype, speculative roadmaps, and vanity qubit counts.
While that noise hasn't completely disappeared, Quantum World Congress 2026 proved that the market's tolerance for hype is rapidly wearing thin. While benchmark simulations and roadmap announcements still generate headlines, the real conversation on the ground has shifted toward a far more demanding question: who is actually delivering useful execution today and making meaningful progress toward fault-tolerant quantum computing?
At Quantinuum, our stance has never wavered. Progress is measured by delivering integrated systems that perform useful computation reliably on real hardware and in live enterprise environments. Prove what you can do and publish the results.
What was most encouraging this year at Quantum World Congress was seeing much of the industry increasingly align around that view, with the conversation converging around several priorities in particular.
1. Fault tolerance proven on real hardware is the only credible path to scale
The industry is converging around a shared reality: useful quantum computing will be defined by fault tolerance.
But fault tolerance is not a single metric, a logical-qubit count, or a standalone error-correction demonstration. It requires a complete end-to-end architecture that can detect, correct, and manage errors across every layer of computation, from logical operations to resource-state preparation, and execution of useful algorithms on live hardware.
That is why context matters when evaluating industry announcements.
Demonstrating more logical qubits is not the same as demonstrating fault tolerance. Demonstrating real-time decoding in a simulation is not the same as demonstrating real-time quantum error correction on real hardware. Logical qubits, decoders, syndrome extraction, and resource-state preparation are all necessary ingredients. But proving an individual ingredient in isolation, particularly through simulations or benchmark environments, is fundamentally different from proving that a complete fault-tolerant architecture works on a live quantum computer.
The industry should not confuse progress on individual building blocks with proof of a scalable fault-tolerant system. The real test is whether all these capabilities work together to improve computational performance beyond the physical layer and in a way that can scale.
This is exactly what Quantinuum's Helix architecture is designed to do.
Running on our Helios system, Helix integrates the full stack required for fault-tolerant quantum computing and has already delivered world-class results on live commercial hardware. Helios achieves physical two-qubit gate error rates of 8×10⁻⁴, while Helix has demonstrated a logical compute error rate of 2.8×10⁻⁴, representing a 4.28× improvement over the physical Clifford gate error rate without post-selection, meaning no cherry-picked results.
Just as importantly, Helix improves efficiency as well as reliability. Through adaptive syndrome extraction, it reduces physical gate requirements by 33% and wall-clock execution time by 23%. Today, the architecture is already supporting full computations using 64 error-detected logical qubits with better-than-physical performance and a highly efficient 1:1.5 encoding rate.
These results matter because they demonstrate more than isolated milestones. They show that a scalable fault-tolerant architecture is operating on real hardware today and delivering measurable improvements in computational reliability. As physical systems grow, Helix provides the framework that enables additional scale to translate into increasingly reliable computation.
The path to fault tolerance will continue to evolve. New codes, encoding approaches, and implementation techniques will emerge over time. What remains constant is the need for an architecture capable of orchestrating those innovations into a practical, scalable system. We believe Helix is well positioned to serve as that architecture.
2. The industry must measure performance with useful, standardized metrics
Customers cannot make informed buying decisions if every vendor continues to grade their own homework. Standardized benchmarks are critical because they shift the conversation from theoretical promises to actual, measurable usefulness.
While earlier benchmarks like Quantum Volume were helpful for NISQ-era systems, they don’t keep pace as fault-tolerant systems scale beyond classical simulation limits. That is why Quantinuum is helping drive industry alignment around QUOPS, developed by Sandia National Laboratories with input from NVIDIA and Quantinuum.
QUOPS measures true computational capability by evaluating both computational Size (QUOPS) and Speed (QUOPS/sec). It’s the difference between rating an engine by theoretical horsepower versus measuring how fast and far a vehicle can drive on an actual track.
Most importantly, QUOPS evaluates the capability delivered by the complete computing stack. As the industry moves toward fault-tolerant systems, useful benchmarks must measure the performance of the entire architecture rather than individual subsystems. They must remain transparent as workloads scale, allowing enterprises to clearly evaluate the real-world utility of a system for their specific problem sets.
3. The industrial manufacturing race is on
Proving a fault-tolerant concept on a laboratory bench is only the first step. The transition to utility-scale computing is fundamentally an engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing race.
Our roadmap clearly defines how we scale from a single chip with a 2D-grid layout to larger multi-chip packages. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we are leveraging proven semiconductor manufacturing techniques that built the modern microelectronics industry. We have backed this architecture with a world-class industrial ecosystem, partnering with commercial foundries and component leaders.
The companies that win the next phase of quantum computing will not simply invent breakthrough technologies. They will demonstrate the ability to manufacture, deploy, and scale them reliably.
4. Growing the ecosystem requires a powerful developer platform built for the fault-tolerant era
A high-performing QPU is only part of the equation. You also need the software layer required to run it. For quantum to succeed, it must integrate into the workflows developers and enterprise researchers are already using today.
Nexus is our developer platform designed to be the purpose-built enterprise integration layer, designed from the ground up to squeeze maximum power and accuracy out of Quantinuum’s architectures. Nexus provides seamless interoperability across native Guppy, NVIDIA CUDA-Q, and Microsoft Q#, directly connecting quantum hardware to classical AI and HPC environments.
This is not an experimental platform. It is already supporting meaningful commercial adoption today.
Adopted by more than 200 organizations, representing approximately 45% growth, and used by more than 1,000 active developers, Nexus has seen annual job submissions increase 10x when comparing August 2024-August 2025 with August 2025-August 2026.
As quantum computing enters the fault-tolerant era, the winning platform will be the one that makes advanced quantum capabilities accessible within the workflows enterprises already depend on.
5. Real progress is measured in live production deployments and real-world research
The future of high-performance computing isn't quantum versus AI or HPC. It is all three working together as a unified compute stack.
But we believe the true test of market leadership isn't a self-funded trial or a desktop simulation that claims hybrid integration. It is putting live hardware into mission-critical operational environments to solve real enterprise problems and advance meaningful science.
That is why we are focused on embedding our quantum systems directly into global computing infrastructure. Through our partnership with Oracle, we expect to bring commercial-scale quantum computing directly into an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI data center, with the goal of letting enterprise customers run quantum applications within their existing cloud footprint.
Similarly, our deep, multi-year collaboration with NVIDIA continues to advance the frontiers of hybrid compute: from co-founding the NVAQC center in Boston to physically integrating NVIDIA GPUs into our Helios hardware for real-time error correction, to running live workflows with Pfizer to help accelerate pharmaceutical discovery.
Ultimately, as we scale these capabilities from the system level to the enterprise, we believe quantum computing can serve as the crucial engine to unlock far greater value from classical AI. By integrating QPUs alongside GPUs and supercomputers, we are working to move beyond the limitations of classical compute alone.
This hybrid approach enables enterprises to generate higher-quality quantum training data, build more powerful models, and tackle complex chemistry and materials challenges that remain beyond the reach of classical AI by itself.
Looking Ahead
Quantum World Congress 2026 proved that the market is finally asking the right questions:
- How do we achieve true fault tolerance at scale?
- How do we measure objective computational capability?
- How do we deploy quantum systems to solve real-world enterprise problems?
The conversation is shifting from theoretical possibility to demonstrated capability. From isolated milestones to integrated systems. From simulations to real hardware. That is where meaningful progress happens. And that is where Quantinuum intends to continue to lead.
Forward-Looking Statements:
This blog post contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements about expected product capabilities, technology development timelines, planned partnerships and deployments, and anticipated market trends, and expected business metrics and growth rates. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks related to technology development, competitive dynamics, customer adoption, and partnership execution. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date made, and Quantinuum undertakes no obligation to update them. For a discussion of factors that could affect outcomes, please refer to Quantinuum's public filings.
For enterprise and public sector executives evaluating quantum computing investment
Quantum computing is now a strategic priority for many organizations. It's on track to help solve some of the world's biggest challenges, from drug discovery, to materials science, to optimization problems – all at a scale classical computers simply can't reach. For executives responsible for R&D, technology strategy, or innovation investment, the question is no longer whether quantum computing matters. It's how to approach it wisely.
That's a harder question than it sounds. The quantum computing market is crowded, technical, and moving fast, and most of the guidance available is written for physicists, not for the executives who actually have to make the investment decision. Vendor claims are difficult to compare, pilot programs are easy to get wrong, and the gap between "quantum is exciting" and "quantum is worth investing in this year" isn't always well explained.
Our new guide, A Strategic Guide to Selecting the Right Quantum Computing Solution, is built to close that gap.
What's Inside
The guide is designed to give business and technology leaders a clear, practical path through four essential questions:
- Why quantum computing matters now, and why the window for early strategic advantage is open today
- How to evaluate vendors objectively, using a structured framework rather than marketing claims
- How to design an effective pilot, so early investment produces real, usable evidence
- How to take your first steps with confidence, whether you're just starting to explore or ready to scale
It also includes a glossary of key terms, so readers new to the field aren't left decoding jargon before they can evaluate a single vendor.
Who Should Read It
The guide is written for CTOs, CIOs, CISOs, R&D leaders, and program directors across enterprise and public sector organizations, at any stage of quantum familiarity. Whether your organization hasn't yet started exploring quantum computing, or you already have a program underway and are looking to sharpen your evaluation process, the framework inside is designed to apply.
How to Use It
The evaluation framework at the core of the guide isn't specific to any one vendor; it's designed to be applied to any quantum computing solution you're considering, so you can make an apples-to-apples comparison based on your organization's actual needs. The guide also walks through how Quantinuum maps to that same framework, and what it looks like to work with Quantinuum as a co-development partner, should you want a concrete reference point alongside the general framework.
Start With Confidence, Not Guesswork
Quantum computing is a strategic decision, not just a technical one. The organizations that approach it with a clear framework, rather than reacting to the noise, will be the ones positioned to capture real value as the technology matures.