AWS and QuEra Computing just put a date on one of quantum computing’s biggest promises. The two companies announced an expanded collaboration to launch QuEra’s first fault-tolerant quantum computer, called Libra, on the Amazon Braket platform by 2028.
The system is designed to exceed 256 error-corrected logical qubits with a logical error rate of 10⁻⁶. In English: roughly one million reliable quantum operations running across hundreds of qubits, a threshold the industry calls “Megaquop-scale” performance. That’s a significant leap from the noisy, error-prone machines currently available.
What Libra actually is
Logical qubits are built from clusters of physical qubits working together to catch and correct mistakes. A machine with 256 logical qubits operating at one-in-a-million error rates would be a fundamentally different tool than anything that exists today. Current systems, including QuEra’s own Aquila processor already available on Amazon Braket, offer up to 256 physical qubits in analog mode.
QuEra uses neutral-atom architecture, which traps individual atoms with laser beams to perform computations. This approach competes with superconducting systems (favored by Google and IBM) and trapped-ion processors (the specialty of companies like IonQ and Quantinuum). The neutral-atom method has shown particular promise for scaling up qubit counts while maintaining the connectivity needed for error correction.
