Nobody knows exactly how many quantum computers exist, because no government or standards body keeps a census. What can be counted is a floor: one market-intelligence tracker has logged 144 publicly disclosed system sales and 18 leases since 2013, and on top of those sit the machines vendors keep for their own cloud services and research, such as the nine processors IBM lists publicly.
The figure you get depends on what you count. A lab prototype on an optical bench, a processor reachable over the cloud and a refrigerator-sized system sold to a supercomputing centre are all called quantum computers, but they show up in different lists, or in none.
The closest thing to a tally
The most detailed public count comes from The Quantum Insider’s market-intelligence team. Its page “How many quantum computers have been sold?”, updated on 30 September 2026, records 204 deals from 2013 to the first quarter of 2026. Of those, 144 are system sales and 18 are system leases, involving 55 vendors and deals in 26 countries. The remaining deals are research engagements, cloud-access contracts, networking and services.
The same dataset shows how sales have picked up. Through 2019 to 2021 there were around four or five deals a year. That rose to 33 in 2022, 36 in 2023 and a peak of 54 in 2024, before falling to 39 in 2025. Twelve were recorded in the first quarter of 2026.
By vendor, IQM led with 25 deals, followed by IonQ with 19, D-Wave with 15 and IBM with 12. The tracker puts IBM’s tracked deal value at about $732 million, or roughly $66 million per deal, against about $14 million on average for IQM.
The Quantum Insider describes its total as “a floor rather than a census”. It counts only deals with a public source, so unannounced sales, particularly to defence customers, are missing. It also excludes machines that companies build and keep for their own research or cloud services, which is where many of the most capable systems sit.
Why the counts disagree
Published estimates range widely because they mix three different populations.
- Prototypes and research chips. Universities, national laboratories and companies build processors for experiments. Many never leave the lab and are never announced as products. Google‘s Willow chip, for example, is used for headline research results but is not described by Google as a commercial service.
- Cloud-accessible systems. IBM, Quantinuum, IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave, Pasqal and others sell time on machines they operate themselves. These are the easiest to count because vendors list them, but lists change as processors are upgraded or retired.
- On-premises systems sold to customers. Supercomputing centres, governments and a few companies buy machines outright. These appear in press releases and sales trackers, but delivery often comes a year or more after the deal is signed.
Some machines also sit in more than one category. A system sold to a European computing centre may be reachable through the vendor’s cloud, and a vendor’s cloud machine may be the same hardware it sells on-premises. Different counting methods therefore double-count or miss the same machine.
Modality adds another complication. D-Wave’s annealers have thousands of qubits but solve a narrower class of optimisation problems than gate-based machines, so some tallies leave them out altogether. Qubit numbers are also not directly comparable across technologies: a 98-qubit trapped-ion system and a 156-qubit superconducting chip differ in error rates and connectivity as well as size.
What the vendors list
IBM publishes the most transparent fleet list. When checked on 4 November 2026, its IBM Quantum Platform systems page showed nine processors: seven in its US East region and two in its EU region in Germany (ibm_berlin and ibm_aachen). Five use the 156-qubit Heron processor and four the 120-qubit Nighthawk. That page shows cloud-reachable systems only; IBM’s on-premises installations for customers are not all listed there.
Other makers rarely publish a single fleet figure. D-Wave says only that it continues to expand its fleet, and IQM claims to have sold more on-premises systems than any other manufacturer without giving a number. Those claims cannot be checked against a public list.
Major makers and flagship systems
The table below lists the flagship system for each major maker, with figures taken from company announcements. Qubit counts are physical qubits as stated by each company. All details are as of 4 November 2026.
| Maker | Modality | Flagship system | Qubits | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IBM | Superconducting | Nighthawk; Heron r2/r3 | 120; 156 | Nine processors listed on IBM’s cloud platform |
| Google Quantum AI | Superconducting | Willow | 105 | Research chip, released 2024 |
| Quantinuum | Trapped ion | Helios | 98 | Launched 5 November 2025; cloud and on-premises |
| IonQ | Trapped ion | Superion 256 | 256 | Orders open since 8 September 2026; deliveries in 2027 |
| Rigetti | Superconducting | Cepheus-1-108Q | 108 | Generally available since 7 April 2026 via Rigetti cloud and Amazon Braket |
| D-Wave | Quantum annealing | Advantage2 | 4,400+ | Generally available since 20 May 2025; cloud and on-premises |
| Pasqal | Neutral atom | Orion Gamma | 140+ | Available on Pasqal Cloud |
| IQM | Superconducting | Radiance / Halocene | 150 | Halocene 150-qubit system due commercially by end of 2026 |
Notes on the table
- Quantinuum says Helios has 98 physical qubits, a two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.921% and single-qubit fidelity of 99.9975%, according to its launch announcement. The deal included in-country access for Singapore’s National Quantum Office.
- Google gives Willow’s single-qubit gate fidelity as 99.97% and entangling gate fidelity as 99.88% in its hardware write-up on the Quantum Echoes experiment.
- IonQ pre-sold its first Superion 256 in the first quarter of 2026, without naming the buyer, according to The Quantum Insider. Until deliveries begin, IonQ’s operating fleet consists of earlier systems.
- Rigetti builds Cepheus-1-108Q from twelve 9-qubit chiplets and reports a median two-qubit fidelity of 99.1%, with a target of 99.5% later in 2026, according to its general availability announcement.
- D-Wave sells Advantage2 through its Leap cloud service and for on-premises installation, including an upgrade at Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Centre and a system for Davidson Technologies in Alabama, according to its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
- Pasqal lists deployments at Jülich in Germany, CEA in France, CINECA in Italy, Aramco in Saudi Arabia and DistriQ in Canada on its hardware page. Its 500-qubit-plus Centaurus is open for orders in 2026, with deliveries from 2027.
- IQM said in November 2025 that the first Halocene installations would start at the end of 2026, with the product line aimed at error-correction research.
National programmes
Public programmes add machines that do not always show up in vendor counts. The EU’s EuroHPC Joint Undertaking has procured six quantum computers for European supercomputing centres. When it inaugurated Euro-Q-Exa in Munich on 12 February 2026, the European Commission said four were operational and two, in the Netherlands and Luxembourg, were still under procurement. The operational systems include PIAST-Q in Poznań, VLQ in Ostrava and Euro-Q-Exa, an IQM machine with 54 qubits at launch and a 150-qubit upgrade planned. Two analogue quantum simulators, Jade at Jülich and Ruby at GENCI in France, were inaugurated separately in late 2025.
A reasonable answer
If you want one sentence: at least 162 quantum computers have been publicly recorded as sold or leased since 2013, according to The Quantum Insider, and vendors operate more for cloud access and research that no shared register counts. Any number more precise than that needs a definition attached, and should be treated as a minimum. With IonQ, IQM and Pasqal all scheduling deliveries for late 2026 and 2027, the count will keep rising.
More on TechAnnouncer: Superposition in quantum computing explained.
Sources
- The Quantum Insider: How many quantum computers have been sold?
- IBM Quantum Platform: systems list
- Quantinuum: commercial launch of Helios
- Google: Our quantum hardware, the engine for verifiable quantum advantage
- The Quantum Insider: IonQ launches Superion 256
- Rigetti: general availability of 108-qubit system
- D-Wave: general availability of Advantage2 (SEC filing)
- Pasqal: hardware
- IQM: Halocene launch
- EuroHPC JU: inauguration of Euro-Q-Exa
