According to the announcement, published by The Quantum Insider, the first deployment co-locates IBM's quantum computers, including the 120-qubit Nighthawk, with Oak Ridge's Umbra system, built on AMD Instinct MI355X accelerators and fifth-generation EPYC processors. The AMD compute will support research into error correction, decoding optimization and software orchestration.
The work is part of the US Department of Energy's Quantum Genesis Mission, which targets 100 logical qubits running 100,000 hard operations by late 2028. IBM says its experiments have so far reached 70 logical qubits and 438 hard operations, meaning a roughly 230-fold increase in operation count is needed to hit the target.