Q-CTRL, the Australian-founded quantum infrastructure software company, announced on Tuesday that it has achieved what it calls practical quantum advantage on a commercially relevant problem, completing a materials science simulation on IBM’s 120-qubit quantum platform in two minutes compared to over 100 hours using the best available classical software — a 3,000-fold speedup.
The Demonstration
The result centers on fermionic simulation, a computational problem focused on how electrons in materials give rise to properties used in energy transmission, storage, and generation — including in superconductors and energy storage materials. Q-CTRL’s performance-management software suppressed errors during runtime on IBM’s quantum hardware, enabling the system to use 120 qubits and over 9,000 two-qubit quantum-logic operations.
For classical benchmarking, Q-CTRL compared the quantum outputs against a tensor network package called Time-Dependent Variational Principle (TDVP) from the Flatiron Institute, a tool behind more than 1,250 technical publications since 2015. The two approaches agreed to within about 1%, but achieving that level of agreement required the classical simulation to run for over 160 hours on a high-performance cluster, while the quantum calculation — including all preprocessing, communication, and data processing — completed in roughly two and a half minutes.
Industry Reaction and Context
The announcement arrives just days after IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told analysts during IBM’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call that the company expected partners to “achieve the first examples of quantum advantage this year, leveraging IBM hardware.”
“These results mark the beginning of an era of positive ROI from today’s widely available quantum computers on problems that early adopters truly care about,” said Q-CTRL CEO and founder Michael J. Biercuk.
Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and an IBM Fellow, said the result shows “how these systems contribute to scientific workflows,” adding that IBM has “moved past the question of whether quantum computers have utility and onto the question of how to use them well.”
What Comes Next
The infrastructure software configuration used in the demonstration will soon be publicly accessible as a Qiskit Function on the IBM Quantum Platform, allowing researchers and enterprise users to incorporate quantum computing into chemistry and materials R&D workflows. Q-CTRL acknowledged the possibility that future specialized classical algorithms or GPU-accelerated approaches could narrow the gap, but noted that such solutions “have remained unavailable to date despite significant research and industry demand.”
With approximately one-third of global supercomputer time currently dedicated to chemistry and materials simulation, the company frames the result as a signal that quantum computing is ready for integration into enterprise research pipelines — a position echoed by Jean-Francois Bobier of the Boston Consulting Group, who called the achievement “a major signal to industry that quantum simulation is both ready and an essential component of the R&D roadmap for future materials discovery.”
