November 2026: the first QubitRank rankings
Our first edition. Five races ranked on checked evidence, one big claim held up to the light, and why "quantum advantage" keeps being argued over.
Welcome to the first QubitRank Monthly. Every month we rank today's quantum computers race by race, using checked, published evidence from our sister site QubitBenchmark, and we hold the month's biggest claim up to the light.
The headline this month: there's no single winner. Quantinuum leads on accuracy and on error-corrected qubits, IBM leads on what you can actually use today, and a neutral-atom machine from Atom Computing has the most qubits. Several races are still thin, because few results have been measured in comparable ways. That's an honest picture of where the field is, and it's why we show which results we left out, and why.
The claim worth checking: Microsoft says its Majorana chips contain a new kind of qubit that resists errors by design. Our Reality Check finds the idea ambitious and the engineering progressing, but the central claim is still disputed.
Leaders this month
All rankings →| Race | Leader | Result | Move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Most accurate | HeliosQuantinuum | 99.92 % | · not ranked last month |
| Error-corrected qubits | HeliosQuantinuum | 48 logical qubits | · not ranked last month |
| Most qubits | Ytterbium atom arrayAtom Computing | 256 qubits | · not ranked last month |
| Fastest | Nighthawk r2IBM | 2,000,000 layers per second | · not ranked last month |
| Use it today | Nighthawk r2IBM | 120 qubits | · not ranked last month |
Reality Check
Microsoft's Majorana chips: has it built a topological qubit?
Microsoft says its Majorana chips use a new kind of qubit that resists errors by design, and that a scalable machine could arrive by 2029. The underlying physics is still disputed, and no working topological qubit operations have been published. Verdict: Not yet shown. An ambitious idea with real progress, but the key claim is disputed.
Also this month
- Published MIT's Quantum Index Report 2026 compares about 300 quantum processors
- Announced Quantinuum reports a tenfold improvement in error-corrected accuracy on Helios
- Official decision DARPA moves IBM, IonQ, Atom Computing and Diraq into the final stage of its quantum test
- Preprint Independent study finds Quantinuum ahead of IBM on error-correction building blocks
- Disputed One of IBM's "quantum advantage" experiments is reproduced on ordinary computers
Coming up
- IBM's Kookaburra processor and its promise of community-confirmed quantum advantage are both due by the end of 2026.
- Microsoft and Atom Computing say their Magne machine in Copenhagen should be running by early 2027.
- QubitBenchmark's next data release, which will show the first month-on-month movement in our rankings.