IBM wants to redefine the future of computing. And inside this ultra-cold, high-tech lab, it’s betting everything on a technology that doesn’t just push the limits of physics—it rewrites them. Welcome to IBM’s Quantum Lab: where the world’s oldest tech company is making its boldest bet yet.


Behind IBM’s Boldest Bet: The Quantum Test Lab

Inside IBM's ultra cold quantum lab, that is colder than outer space. 

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 Inside an ultra-cold lab, IBM is racing to build the future of quantum computing. Fortune got an inside look. 

Inside an ultra-cold lab, IBM is racing to build the future of computing. By betting big on quantum, the company hopes to solve problems classical machines never could.

Inside IBM’s Quantum Lab: Building the AI of the Future

So this is the inside of one of our Heron characterization systems. It's the largest quantum processor that's available for people to use out there. Welcome to IBM's Quantum Lab, where one of the world's oldest tech companies is making its boldest bet yet. We see ourselves as always having a dual mission in research. One is to be Organic growth engine of the company and that the second mission in IBM research is to invent the future of computing at IBM, that future is being molded inside this ultra cold high-tech lab. It's making a big bet on a technology that turns the strangest laws of quantum physics into raw computing power. IBM's Yorktown Heights campus was designed in the early 1960s and was one of the final projects of the visionary architect Eero Saarinen, known for futuristic designs that captured the spirit of technological advancement like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the TWA Flight Center at JFK Airport. Nestled inside the building, this quantum computing lab is more than an experiment in physics. It's an experiment in corporate reinvention. Welcome to our quantum characterization and test lab. Typically what we do here is a lot of the pre-testing and checking of our quantum chips. What you hear are actually our quantum computing test systems that you're looking at right here. It's kind of noisy. That's the sound of these refrigeration systems that we have. It's actually a compressor that basically takes our quantum chips and cool them down to 100 times colder than outer space. What we're looking at here are a couple of our quantum processor chips. So that one chip in there has 1000 qubits on it. Unlike the binary ones and zeros of classical computers, quantum machines use qubits, able to represent many states at once. That lets them solve problems too complex for today's most powerful supercomputers. While other tech giants race to own the cloud or dominate large language models, IBM is carving out a different future, one where quantum and AI converge to tackle the world's. Most complex challenges. IBM is obviously making some really big bets in AI and quantum. It feels like you're all in, but so much of that comes from where we're sitting right now at the IBM research lab. You're right, in so many ways there's like this thread of connectivity from the past to the future, and sort of IBM research is at the fulcrum of that thread across IBM's history. For decades, IBM was the titan of business tech. The company was known for popularizing the punch card and the magnetic stripe credit card. They built towering mainframe computers and its early Watson AI became famous for winning Jeopardy. Since 1961 when we've had this building, this has been like the mother ship. Now IBM research the mothership, yeah, IBM Research is global. We have labs across the globe, but this is the mothership because this is where we actually have our AI systems, our quantum system too. It inspires our clients, it inspires our partners, and certainly inspires our employees. IBM was the titan of business tech until it wasn't. Caught between the rise of big cloud and the boom of consumer software, IBM slowly faded from relevance. Yet under CEO Arvind Krishna, that story is changing. He spun off the company's slower moving divisions, doubled down on artificial intelligence, and revived a moonshot that's been decades in the making, quantum computing. This is our think lab. There's a quantum computer here. There's an AI supercomputer here and there's classiccompute all throughout. There's our Z system. So this is really where uh this vision of the future of computing bits, neurons, and qubits all come together in one place. A good way to think about it really is that nature and everything that we experience around us, it really obeys the laws of quantum mechanics, but we don't really experience that. We don't really, you know, per se care, but underlying is it entirely very rich mathematics. That when it's leveraged to compute, you can do things entirely different from what you can do with your classical computers that rely on bits, zeros and ones, for example. So the desktop on your desktop, your phone, right, even the most powerful GPUs out there, they're still using zeros and ones. But when you have a quantum computer, you're using a much richer mathematical representation. It changes the rules for how you can actually process information. From the outside, I feel like for a lot of people, AI, maybe people are starting to wrap their minds around how this fits into my daily life into my daily work. Quantum feels so much farther away than that, and yet it's being so hyped right now. We have always thought about it in sort of three stages. We've said those. Quantum utility, quantum advantage, and then we'll talk about full fall tolerant computing. We said there was quantum utility already in 2023 where you're able to show that a combination of quantum and classical computing is you can do things that you couldn't do classically even by simulation. So I mean, so this is actually the inside of one of our refrigeration systems, OK? You see a lot of cabling and a lot of wiring. I'll get my colleagues to open it up for you to see the inside of it. When people say, Oh, this is hype, this is never really going to happen for real, you say what? Well, we have proof points. This is where we work with our global set of partners. It's not just us seeing anymore, right? So our most recent demonstration is with our partners Rean in Japan. Combining our quantum computer with the Fugaku supercomputer. So this is not all abstract. Here is data. He is an experiment. Here is what you would have done classically. Here is quantum and classical working together. I think demystification is a, actually having systems people can work with. 2, working with an ecosystem of partners. I think we have a worldwide network of over 250 partners. IBM knows the stakes. Quantum computing is far from changing anything tech in your hands right now, but its impact could reshape global industries. And if IBM is right, it won't just compete with today's tech giants, it will leapfrog them. But if it's wrong, this lab becomes another cautionary tale of corporate overreach. So here we're looking at. This is all going to grow in miniature form, miniature form, right? I think, but it's good sense to show the concept of modularity, right, where you know you have your classical sort of compute clusters, you have your cryogenic infrastructure where the quantum processors sit, and then there's classical electronics around it, but we really designed this in a way that is that has this opportunity to scale and you know we really have a vision of building this out. IBM's CEO is betting that deep tech is still worth the risk, and Wall Street agrees the company's shares reached a record high in June, driven by the company's announcement of a roadmap to build the world's first large scale fault tolerant quantum computer by 2029. Already IBM is bringing in partners from research labs to Fortune 500s, eager to be early adopters of what could become the most transformative computing shift since the microchip. Kids today, they might not think of IBM. When they think AI they think open AI they think Google, they think anthropic. Does that concern you or do you see IBM just having a different path? Companies with a consumer business have a natural opportunity to have their technology in the hands of consumers, and that gives them a natural path too. Visibility and awareness, but I think we're very, very comfortable honestly as a company and including the research division that we are an enterprise focused company, but that doesn't change the fact that we are really moving the needle on the future of computing. It's just we need different parts for that awareness to drive it. We have learned, especially in AI predictions beyond 35 years. Yes, I could tell you anything you wanted, and, and so, so acknowledging the uncertainty of that, we believe that our combination of AI and hybrid cloud allows us to tap into the biggest market. So success is being the absolute leader in enterprise AI.