NQCC advances seven quantum testbeds to full-scale evaluation

Seven testbeds enter technical evaluation

The UK National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), in partnership with Innovate UK, has published the Quantum Computing Testbed Initiative Phase 1 Report, confirming that seven commercial quantum-computing testbeds have been physically deployed, commissioned and delivered at the Harwell Campus. The program is financed through a £30 million Small Business Research Initiative award and establishes NQCC as an institutional “alpha customer” for evaluating different hardware architectures under uniform operating conditions.

Phase 1 focused on facility readiness, logistics and initial commissioning. Six testbeds were commissioned in NQCC-managed halls at Harwell, while QuEra established a dedicated UK operating facility and clean room. Rigetti’s deployment took nine months. The phase-1 work did not yet constitute the planned full technical evaluation of the systems.

Phase 2 extends evaluation through Q2 2027

The program’s second phase, known as Testbed Technical Evaluation, is scheduled to run through the second quarter of 2027 with the Quantum Software Lab at the University of Edinburgh. The work is intended to apply independent benchmarks to system-level metrics, investigate noise behavior and assess each modality’s suitability for particular computational classes.

The planned evaluation includes building-block projects led by the Quantum Software Lab and hardware teams, covering error mitigation, syndrome-decoding latency and metrics associated with verifiable quantum advantage. NQCC applications engineers are also expected to manage pipeline projects applying Hamiltonian simulation, combinatorial optimization and quantum machine learning workflows to the deployed hardware’s reported characteristics. These are evaluation plans rather than completed assessments.

The installed systems span multiple hardware approaches

The seven testbeds represent integrated photonics, neutral atoms, trapped ions, silicon spin qubits and superconducting circuits. Aegiq’s Artemis system uses a deterministic single-photon source and hybrid semiconductor-photonic routing in standard data-center racks. Infleqtion UK’s Sqale platform uses a neutral-atom tweezer array with a 16-by-16 qubit-site geometry and was reported as a 100-qubit operational system.

ORCA Computing’s Asteroidea platform combines quantum dots, cavity-enhanced spontaneous parametric down-conversion, squeezed vacuum and an embedded GPU, with a reported 2 MHz processor. Quantum Motion’s QM One is a silicon spin-qubit processor manufactured through industrial 300-millimeter wafer-scale CMOS processes and includes automated drift calibration compatible with Qiskit, Cirq and PennyLane.

Hardware metrics remain system-specific

The report lists differentiated performance measures for the installed platforms. Oxford Ionics’ QuARTET trapped-ion system, associated in the report with IonQ following its acquisition of Oxford Ionics, was reported to use barium-133 and barium-137 ions with on-chip electronic control. Its listed results include 10-second coherence times and 99.97(3)% SPAM fidelity, with a chassis designed for in-field upgrades up to 256 qubits.

QuEra UK’s Generation-4, also identified as CAST, uses a neutral-atom tweezer array and zoned shuttling architecture that separates memory and gate execution. The report lists 200 physical qubits across 2,000 register sites, 99% atom initialization and 150-microsecond shuttling times. These figures describe different architectures and measurement categories, so they do not constitute a single cross-system performance ranking.

Rigetti system and broader funding context

Rigetti UK’s Ankaa-class system, identified with the HERMES platform, uses superconducting circuits. The report says its 24-qubit, four-by-six lattice was upgraded to 36 qubits in a six-by-six arrangement with 38 tunable couplers. It is integrated with Riverlane’s Deltaflow decoder and OmegaStar controls for real-time quantum-error correction.

Participants in the testbed cohort reportedly raised about $715 million in private venture funding during 2025. The report also cites IonQ’s acquisition of Oxford Ionics as an example of corporate consolidation in the sector. Those financing and acquisition figures provide wider industry context but are separate from the testbed commissioning and technical evaluation.

Next evaluation milestone

The next verifiable milestone is the progression of Phase 2 benchmarking through Q2 2027. Future disclosures would need to show which independently defined measurements are applied, how results compare across architectures within compatible testing conditions, and what the program concludes about suitability for specific computational classes.