Singapore Readies a Million-Qubit Run, and Physicists Urge Patience

SINGAPORE — The Singapore Institute has confirmed it will attempt a million-qubit processor run over the Q-Net backbone in the middle of September, and the physicist most associated with the effort spent this week managing expectations. "Two years ago our best error-corrected run held a few thousand logical qubits stable; this is an attempt two orders of magnitude past that," said Dr. Wei-Lin Tan, framing the test as an engineering rehearsal. The Q-Net link the run rides on is a quantum-key-distribution line — it protects the traffic and moves nothing faster than light — and the processor itself runs on complex programming, not judgment. What the run may show is error correction holding at a scale that has defeated every prior attempt. Rivals at Quanta Lattice Systems are watching the same benchmark. The run is booked for mid-month; until then the hardware sits at fifteen millikelvin and the benchmark stays unclaimed.