New superconducting two-qubit gate error record: 4.93×10⁻⁴
IBM's public quantum systems dashboard showed a new record-low two-qubit gate error for superconducting hardware on 2 September 2026: 4.93×10⁻⁴, the best calibrated CZ pair on ibm_berlin, a 120-qubit Nighthawk r1 processor. Note: this is a live calibration figure observed on the dashboard on that date, not a value IBM has announced as a record; the Nighthawk launch itself advertises connectivity and throughput, and describes gate fidelity as Heron-class. Please verify before sending.
What changed
The previous superconducting record was 5.19×10⁻⁴ (IBM Heron r3, ibm_pittsburgh, 2025). The new value drops the per-gate error rate by about 5%.
Same metric as the previous point: the best two-qubit error across all calibrated pairs on one device. The device's layered two-qubit error (5.26×10⁻³) and median (2.10×10⁻³) are much higher; the record series deliberately tracks the best demonstrated gate, so per-device typical performance should be read from the current quantum computers table, which is unchanged: the Nighthawk r1's 120 qubits do not beat Heron r3's 156 under the site's quantum-volume rule.
Nighthawk is IBM's first square-lattice processor (four nearest neighbours per qubit instead of two or three), with 218 tunable couplers and a hardware reset that cuts the idle time between circuits to as little as one microsecond; IBM projects up to 100,000 circuits per second for the r2 revision (https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/nighthawk-r2). Those are the headline gains of the new family; the two-qubit error record is a by-product.
Run a scenario at the new rateSource: https://quantum.cloud.ibm.com/computers?processorType=Nighthawk