IBM, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and AMD have launched a joint platform that puts quantum computers and supercomputers in the same room, in a bid to solve the error-correction problem standing between today's quantum machines and useful ones.

The co-design platform for quantum error correction was unveiled on 5 November by IBM, the US Department of Energy-funded Quantum Science Center at Oak Ridge, and AMD. Its first deployment co-locates IBM's quantum computers — including its most powerful processor, the 120-qubit IBM Quantum Nighthawk — with Oak Ridge's Umbra high-performance computing system, powered by AMD Instinct MI355X graphics processors and fifth-generation AMD EPYC central processors.

Quantum error correction is the field's central challenge. Quantum information is fragile: noise corrupts it, and the more qubits a calculation uses, the harder it is to keep the result intact. Researchers have shown in early demonstrations that quantum information can be protected from noise, but scaling those techniques to machines that can tackle real scientific problems needs far more classical computing power alongside the quantum hardware.

That is the gap the new platform is designed to close. Instead of quantum and classical machines talking to each other over cloud connections, with every handoff adding delay, the decoder software that identifies qubit errors will run metres away from the processor it is correcting. Teams can test different error-correction approaches and compare what each one demands in qubits, time, samples and classical resources, learning where AMD's graphics processors in the Umbra system help most.

"The question is no longer if error correction will work on quantum hardware," said Jay Gambetta, IBM Fellow and director of IBM Research. "Today, the question is how to accelerate and optimize error correction to build systems that scientists can use to tackle meaningful problems."

The work feeds directly into the US Department of Energy's Quantum Genesis Mission, whose Q Competition targets 100 logical qubits running 100,000 hard operations by late 2028. IBM's current demonstrations have reached 70 logical qubits and 438 hard operations — a gap the company says means the field needs roughly a 230-fold increase in operation count.

Travis Humble, director of the Quantum Science Center at Oak Ridge, said solving error correction was essential to making quantum computing a practical tool for scientific discovery. "With Umbra, we will now test new ideas, evaluate approaches at scale, and build the foundation for more reliable quantum computers," he said.

AMD's contribution is the classical computing foundation. Its EPYC processors provide the orchestration that coordinates hybrid systems, its Instinct graphics processors accelerate the simulation and decoding work, its Versal adaptive chips handle low-latency control and readout near the quantum processor, and its ROCm open software connects the hardware into one environment.

"The next era of computing will bring the new quantum paradigm together with decades of innovation across the classical hardware and software ecosystem," said Mark Papermaster, AMD's chief technology officer. Ralph Wittig, AMD's head of research and advanced development, added that building useful quantum systems requires the quantum and classical communities to solve system design challenges together.

The platform will also connect with the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, home to the laboratory's new Lux SI supercomputer, which is itself powered by AMD processors and graphics chips. That link is meant to extend the research environment to full scale, so the teams can explore how quantum, artificial intelligence and scientific computing evolve together rather than in isolation.

IBM said the lessons learned would inform its path to IBM Quantum Starling, its planned fault-tolerant quantum computer, and to future supercomputers combining super-intelligence and high-performance computing. The platform builds on existing work between the three partners, including IBM and Oak Ridge results showing how quantum computers and the Frontier supercomputer can simulate real magnetic materials, and IBM's use of AMD graphics processors to accelerate a key quantum workflow known as sample-based quantum diagonalization.

Error correction research on the platform will cover concatenated codes, space-time codes, algorithm-aware decoders, hardware-aware circuit optimisation and software orchestration, all integrated in one stack. IBM's Quantum System API gives researchers pulse-level control of the hardware, letting them measure qubits mid-calculation, act on the results in real time and work directly with raw measurement signals — capabilities the company says are essential for discovering the next generation of error-correction methods.