On October 7, 2026, IBM announced it has been selected for Stage C, the third phase of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) led by DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
What IBM announced
- Stage C moves IBM into DARPA's verification process, in which independent experts extensively test and measure quantum hardware, technology, systems engineering and architecture to determine whether a company can build a fault-tolerant quantum computer.
- DARPA launched QBI in 2024 to determine whether an industrially useful fault-tolerant quantum computer — one whose computational value exceeds its cost — can be built by 2033. Several organizations were selected for Stage A in April 2025; Stage B called for a comprehensive R&D plan and risk-mitigation approach from each company. Stage C, announced today, moves beyond conceptual plans to evaluation by DARPA's independent verification and validation (IV&V) team, which will test the companies' hardware directly.
- Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, said advancing to Stage C "validates the strength of IBM's path to building a fault-tolerant quantum computer," and that IBM expects to deliver its first fault-tolerant system in 2029.
- IBM's quantum computers are already used by a network of more than 340 organizations across financial services, healthcare, materials science, academia and government. IBM says its progress toward IBM Quantum Starling, the fault-tolerant system it laid out plans for last year, has stayed on course, including demonstrations of core hardware components and advances in efficient error-correction decoding.
What it means for the work we deliver
VENETA delivers IBM Quantum to the enterprise through VENETA Korea Inc., which signed the IBM Quantum GSI (Global Systems Integrator) agreement, and our quantum path follows IBM's roadmap.
- Stage C is a hardware-verification milestone, not a hardware change. It does not alter what we run today or the backends we report against; it is independent evidence behind the 2029 date IBM gives us for fault tolerance.
- Our discipline does not depend on this news. Every result we deliver carries its backend, qubits, shots, circuit depth and gap to the classical optimum regardless of where IBM's roadmap stands.
- Fault tolerance still has a date. Until 2029, the parts of a question we keep on the simulator stay on the simulator, and we say so on every result.
Sources: IBM Newsroom, October 7, 2026. Our delivery is described on IBM Quantum delivery. IBM, IBM Quantum and Qiskit are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.