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This story is sponsored by IEEE Quantum Week 2026,13-18 September, Toronto.
Every computing conference loves its speeds and feeds. And the keynote that Jay Gambetta, now director of IBM Research, gave at IEEE Quantum Week 2025 delivered on the specs.
IBM’s Starling will be IBM’s first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing system. The superconducting-based platform is expected in 2029 with 200 logical qubits and capable of 100 million operations. It will require two megawatts of power. Blue Jay will arrive a few years later, marshalling a targeted 2,000 logical qubits and one billion operations.
Gambetta’s talk touched on those numbers, but it didn’t stay there. He also discussed the hardware engineering and software challenges that face utility-scale systems at IBM and other manufacturers that will take quantum computing from the lab to the datacenter.
“Since we put the quantum computer on the cloud [in 2016], we've been investing heavily in packaging. We use the latest 300 mm tools [the industry standard for chip manufacturing.] We use through-substrate vias versus multi-level wiring bump bonds,” Gambetta said, providing better thermal management and connection density.
“All this technology is not needed to get 100 qubits, but we know it’s needed for the long term.”
That’s the value of IEEE Quantum Week. It bridges the gap between the science of quantum computing and the development of the industry surrounding it – the breakthrough physics and the engineering of large, reliable systems.
“I believe very strongly [that system development] needs to be modular. If you want to build a large system, you want to build it in parts, be able to verify each of the parts, put it together, and show that it works,” said Gambetta, who was previously vice president of IBM Quantum.
IBM’s quantum roadmap envisions quantum systems as collections of interconnected modules, each with its own processing capability and communication links, according to his 2025 keynote. The goal is to assemble larger systems from validated components, mirroring how classical computing has scaled over decades.
That same systems perspective carries over into software. The company’s open-source software stack for quantum computing, Qiskit, is already focused on hybrid quantum-classical computing. Gambetta described efforts to integrate quantum hardware with classical systems, including resource management, scheduling, and workflow orchestration.
“It starts to get very complicated,” he said. “There's different jobs running on different resources, different queues [and job handling software.] Things are going on all over the place. You want to start to go to a workflow orchestration, and you want to start to put it in a way the user can see how the different things are connected. We’re asking: How do we embed the quantum into the workflow management so that you can start to have the primitive execution environments working in different ways?”
“You’ve got resource management, you’ve got workload management, and you’ve got workflow orchestration all coming together…We want to start to get where the resources are abstracted away so you can just focus on algorithms.”
Gambetta made it clear in 2025 that useful quantum computers will require scalable hardware, modular system design, deep integration with classical computing, and a full software stack that includes error correction, benchmarking and optimization, and software engineering tools.
All of those elements will be front and center at IEEE Quantum Week 2026 in Toronto, along with quantum sensing, quantum networking, and research applications. Expect more than 1,750 colleagues, world-class keynote speakers, hundreds of technical papers, and dozens of panels and talks 13-18 September. Registration is now open.
