BERKELEY, Calif., Jan. 4, 2024 — Rigetti Computing, Inc., a pioneer in full-stack quantum-classical computing, announced today that its 84-qubit Ankaa-2 quantum system was made publicly available to all of its customers via Rigetti’s Quantum Cloud Services (QCS) on December 20, 2023.

The Ankaa-2 system is based on Rigetti’s fourth generation chip architecture that features tunable couplers and a square lattice, enabling high fidelity 2-qubit operations compared to the Company’s previous systems. Ankaa-2 is also the Company’s highest qubit count quantum processing unit (QPU) available to the public.

Following the internal deployment of Ankaa-1, the Company made iterative improvements through internal R&D to support enhancements to Ankaa-2. As a result, Ankaa-2 achieved a 2% median 2-qubit gate error rate — less than half the error rate of the Company’s previous systems. These fidelity improvements can be attributed to a variety of technology updates to the Ankaa-2 system:

• Implementation of a new chip fabrication process, leading to qubits with fewer atomic defects that would otherwise reduce quantum coherence times
• Incorporation of new superconducting PCB technology that improves thermal performance
• Electronics improvements that generate control signals with less noise

“Rigetti’s focus on improving our median 2-qubit fidelities is a crucial part of our mission to build the world’s most powerful computers. Useful quantum computers will need not only a large number of qubits, but also high quality qubits. Reaching 98% fidelity on the Ankaa-2 system is the result of years of innovation and commitment from our teams across the technology stack. Now that the Ankaa-2 system is available to all of our customers and partners, I look forward to focusing on continued progress in accelerating this transformational technology,” says Dr. Subodh Kulkarni, Rigetti CEO.

“I am thrilled with the progress we are making with our Ankaa-class architecture against our QPU roadmap and qubit performance. To reach quantum advantage we know we need high performance qubits, and a lot of them. We’ve already designed and deployed a modular architecture, tiling multiple chips together demonstrating what we believe is the way forward towards building larger systems. We believe a densely connected square lattice with tunable couplers that allows us to control qubit interactions is the foundation for driving qubit performance. A 2.5x increase in error performance against our previous QPUs, increasing our fidelities by 3%, coupled with our scaling approach, shows us that we have a promising strategy for building increasingly higher performing QPUs to help our customers solve their most pressing problems,” says David Rivas, Rigetti CTO.

The public launch of the Ankaa-2 system follows the release of the Novera QPU, Rigett’s first commercially available QPU, which is based on the same Ankaa-class architecture and designed for hands-on access to state-of-the-art quantum hardware for foundational quantum computing R&D.