IBM teams with Israels Qedma for quantum breakthrough

IBM today reports a scientific breakthrough that also has considerable commercial potential: With the help of the software and algorithms of the Israeli company Qedma IBM surpassed the performance of the world’s most powerful supercomputer with 700,000 core processors using its quantum computer, to conduct a complex experiment in the field of physics.

The experiment was conducted by IBM on a quantum chip that it developed using superconducting technology, which contains 72 physical qubits – different units that allow different calculations to be performed simultaneously.

So far, experiments have also been carried out by IBM’s rivals Google and Quantum, but these have not been able to surpass standard supercomputers due to the “noise” involved in the instability of particles in quantum computing – such as electrons, ions and photons.

Qedma’s software was able to neutralize that noise during the experiment, providing IBM with a scope of calculation never before seen in scientific experiments, equivalent to 74 logical qubits – noise-free processing units.

Being in two places at the same time

To examine the results of the physical test, similar work was conducted with a computer from US company company Quantinuum that operates in a completely different way from IBM: quantum computing based on the manipulation of trapped ions. The results were identical, which gave confidence to the people at IBM and Qedma, who are now preparing to publish this as a scientific study in one of the major scientific journals.

The difficulty in producing a stable quantum calculation that tech giants like Google, Microsoft and IBM have presented so far lies in quantum science itself, which seeks to exploit the surprising and non-trivial property of microscopic particles such as ions, subatomic particles or photons, which is to be in two places at the same time.

Intuitively, this is a property that is difficult to understand – since it is not a characteristic of large objects, but at a level below the molecule it is scientific proof, and already today companies that develop quantum computers testify to its existence. It is like a coin spinning rapidly: if stopped, it will only show one side – heads or tails – but as it spins, it shows both sides at the same time.

A revolution in the way computers work

Quantum computing co Qedma raises $26m

Particles that can be in several places at the same time could revolutionize the way computers work. Instead of processing data based on a variable electrical voltage that distinguishes between zero and one, it is possible to obtain the entire range of possibilities between zero and one by exploiting the property of an ion or photon to simultaneously behave like zero and one, or simultaneously any number on the continuum between zero and one.

One such particle that represents several numbers at once is called a “qubit” – the smallest processing unit in a quantum computer, equivalent to a “bit” in a standard computer.

Because a qubit represents several numbers at once, it is able to perform a much larger amount of calculations than a regular bit, and instead of doing this serially – one after the other – as a regular computer works, a quantum computer will be able to process all this information in parallel, simultaneously.

This is why the development of a new drug molecule will be shortened from a process of years to minutes – through a virtual experiment that will be conducted in a computer that will calculate all the possibilities for the feasibility of the molecule and the reactions it will create simultaneously with other molecules.

Image of an experimental project

The most recognizable name in the quantum industry is IBM, despite the outdated image the company has. In the past, IBM was behind many technological revolutions but lost its dominance when it failed to recognize competition in time, such as its dominance in the field of computing, which it lost to Intel and Lenovo, or as in the AI revolution, where Watson lost its primacy to ChatGPT and the like. However, today IBM is considered the leading company in the development of a quantum computer and has unveiled a processor called Nighthawk that features 120 physical qubits.

The announcements of IBM, Google and IonQ sound impressive and promising, but there is a gap between them and reality – even with 50, 100 or 1,000 qubits, not much can be done. IBM’s quantum computers and even Google’s new chip are not yet efficient enough to compete with Nvidia’s supercomputers, so they still have the image of an experimental project.

Qedma cofounder and CEO Dr. Asif Sinay says, “Quantum particles are so tiny, and the finesse required to control and calibrate them is so high, that the accuracy of the qubits is so low – so much so that their high error rate means that the computers they are based on simply don’t work.

“Each of these qubits is wrong about 1% of the time, and if they work together, they feed each other errors, and the computer becomes useless. At that level of error, for a functioning computer to exist, you need at least 100,000 physical qubits, so the industry understands that its main focus now is to reduce the error rate, or ‘noise’, as it is called.”

The quantum ChatGPT moment”

Even if it is not currently possible to buy an efficient quantum computer at a reasonable price, install it in every office, and perform groundbreaking calculations, the entire market is looking towards the more realistic and immediate point in time that will prove that a quantum computer exists that is more powerful than any virtual simulation that can be performed with existing computing means.

Many call it the “quantum advantage” – or the “quantum ChatGPT moment” – quite similar to AI, which for the first time, after decades of development in laboratories, suddenly became a sensation in November 2022 with the unveiling of the first version of the autonomous conversation engine by OpenAI, which was an unknown company until then.

Dr. Sinay explains that the groundbreaking experiment he conducted with IBM does not constitute proof of a commercial breakthrough, but it does herald it to some extent. “This is a scientific quantum advantage, but one that heralds the feasibility of reaching a commercial breakthrough within about three years,” he says. “This is the beginning of the revolution, like the beginning of the ‘hockey stick’ curve. From here on out, after we have proven feasibility, our engineers are already seeing the result before their eyes.”

Qedma, a startup founded Hebrew University alumni led by Sinay and his colleague Prof. Dorit Aharonov, has developed algorithms that allow noise to be cleaned up in physical qubits using a mechanism based on the optimization of measurements taken over time, one after the other, so that the calculation is done slightly slower, but achieves a higher level of accuracy than the industry average.

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on July 30, 2026.

Source link