Helios and Loon Spark Quantum Shift Toward Error-Corrected, Enterprise Computing

Helios and Loon Spark Quantum Shift Toward Error-Corrected, Enterprise Computing

Published Nov 12, 2025

On Nov 5, 2025 Quantinuum commercially launched Helios, a 98 fully‐connected barium‐ion system claiming 99.9975% single‐qubit and 99.921% two‐qubit gate fidelity, offering 94 error‐detected logical qubits (50 used in magnetism simulations) and 48 fully error‐corrected logical qubits with 99.99% state preparation/measurement fidelity; Helios includes the Guppy Python language, NVIDIA GB200 via NVQLink, real‐time classical control, is available cloud and on‐premises, serves customers including Amgen, BMW, JPMorgan Chase, SoftBank and Sparrow, will be hosted in Singapore in 2026, and positions Quantinuum in DARPA’s QBI phase B toward a utility‐scale "Lumos" by 2033. A week later (Nov 12, 2025) IBM unveiled the experimental Loon chip—fabricated at Albany NanoTech—that adapts a cellphone‐signal algorithm for quantum error correction and, with Nighthawk due end‐2025, outlines a path to useful, error‐corrected machines by 2029 and some quantum‐advantage tasks by late 2026. These developments shift quantum computing toward enterprise utility and near‐term application testing.