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IBM Achieves Quantum Advantage as Shares Plunge 25%

8/2/2026

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Summary

IBM Quantum Advantage

IBM and the University of Chicago achieved quantum advantage with a 70-qubit computation completed in 15 minutes.
The run retained about 28 percent of outputs and delivered a 95 percent confidence guarantee.
Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, said the result puts the field in a quantum-advantage era.
Bill Fefferman, Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, said verification remains a major challenge.

Summary

IBM Shares Plunge

IBM’s shares fell 25% on July 14, its biggest one-day drop, after a Q2 revenue forecast of $17.2 billion.
The Commerce Department will award $1 billion through CHIPS, matched by IBM’s $1 billion, while IBM has pledged over $10 billion in quantum R&D through 2031.
Crypto firms reacted with Galaxy Digital granting $5 million and Coinbase forming a Quantum Advisory Council within a $15 million consortium.

History

Historical Context

Quantum computing moved from theory in the 1980s—Benioff’s quantum Turing machine and Feynman’s simulation proposal—to experimental proof in the late 1990s. In 1998 IBM and Stanford used an NMR processor to run a quantum algorithm, following Shor’s 1994 factoring breakthrough, and the field progressed to Google’s 54-qubit supremacy claim in 2019, illustrating rapid scaling.

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IBM Quantum Advantage

IBM and the University of Chicago achieved quantum advantage with a 70-qubit computation completed in 15 minutes.
The run retained about 28 percent of outputs and delivered a 95 percent confidence guarantee.
Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, said the result puts the field in a quantum-advantage era.
Bill Fefferman, Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, said verification remains a major challenge.

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