On August 19, 2026, IBM announced two modular cryogenic cells at its Poughkeepsie facility now share a single thermal environment below 15 millikelvin. The cells are the first hardware step toward IBM Quantum Starling, the fault-tolerant system IBM targets for 2029. IBM also published the milestone on its own newsroom, so treat the technical claims below as IBM's claims.
Traditional superconducting QPUs live inside cylindrical chandelier cryostats. Those fridges limit wiring density, create heat bottlenecks, and make chip-to-chip connections hard. IBM's new cells are rectangular aluminum-framed units that sit side by side. IBM says each cell gives 2.75 cubic meters of vacuum volume and 0.53 square meters of wiring surface, yielding up to 12 times more wiring space than a Quantum System One fridge. IBM also says it engineered each cell to cool at least 2,000 physical qubits.
The dual-cell assembly cooled from room temperature to 4 Kelvin in under five days before reaching the sub-15 millikelvin base temperature. Later this year IBM will install Nighthawk processors in the cells to begin system-level testing.
Why the shape matters
Chip-to-chip links need short, cryogenic interconnects. IBM uses meter-scale L-coupler cables to move quantum states between adjacent chips at dilution-refrigerator temperatures. The rectangular layout leaves room for those cables and for the control wiring those processors need. IBM's roadmap now calls for more than 1,000 programmable qubits by 2027, linked through L-couplers, with Starling following in 2029.
What is still a claim
A connected cryogenic shell is not a fault-tolerant quantum computer. Starling remains three years away, and the path from modular cooling to logical qubit performance has several steps left. The 12x wiring-space figure, the 2,000-qubit-per-cell target, and the 2027 qubit count are all IBM-reported numbers. Independent groups must later verify the system's error rates and logical overhead.
For context on where this fits, see our IBM quantum advantage breakdown, our guide to IBM's free tier, and our logical qubits explainer. Our hardware overview compares IBM's superconducting approach with trapped-ion and neutral-atom alternatives.