Level 1 — Absolute Beginner
A company in China made a new quantum computer. The company is called Origin Quantum. The city is Hefei.
The new machine has 180 qubits. A qubit is a small piece for quantum work. More qubits means more power.
The old machine had 72 qubits. The new one has more than twice as many. It is called Wukong-180.
People can use the computer for many jobs. They can use it for AI, science and money problems.
- company
- a business that makes or sells things
- China
- a large country in East Asia
- quantum
- about the smallest parts of matter and energy
- qubit
- the basic unit of a quantum computer
- power
- ability to do work
- machine
- a tool that does work
- computer
- a machine that handles data and runs programs
- money
- what people use to buy and sell things
Level 2 — Elementary
Origin Quantum is a quantum computing company based in Hefei, China. On 9 May 2026 the company launched its fourth-generation superconducting quantum computer, the Origin Wukong-180.
The machine has 180 computational qubits and 251 coupling qubits. Coupling qubits are used to connect the others so they can work together. The previous Wukong, launched in 2024, had only 72 qubits.
Origin Quantum says its single-qubit gate fidelity is 99.9% and its two-qubit gate fidelity is 99%. Higher fidelity means fewer errors during a calculation.
The company plans to use the machine for tasks such as AI model training, chemistry research, finance modelling and energy-grid analysis. It will be open to remote users from many countries.
- quantum computing
- computing that uses the strange rules of very small particles
- superconducting
- able to carry electricity with no loss when very cold
- computational qubit
- a qubit that holds the information used in a calculation
- coupling qubit
- a qubit that links other qubits so they can interact
- fidelity
- how correctly something is done compared with what was planned
- error
- a mistake or wrong result
- calculation
- the work of finding an answer with numbers
- remote
- done from a distance, often through the internet
Level 3 — Intermediate
Origin Quantum, the Hefei-based firm that has spearheaded China's effort to build a domestic quantum-computing supply chain, unveiled its fourth-generation superconducting machine, the Origin Wukong-180, on 9 May 2026. The system carries 180 computational qubits alongside 251 coupling qubits, a roughly two-and-a-half-fold qubit jump over its 72-qubit predecessor.
The company reports single-qubit gate fidelities of 99.9%, two-qubit gate fidelities of 99% and readout fidelities of 99%. While such headline numbers depend heavily on calibration protocols, the figures place Wukong-180 broadly in the same technical bracket as recent superconducting processors from Google, IBM and Quantinuum.
All four sub-systems — the quantum chip, the measurement-and-control electronics, the cryogenic support equipment and the operating system — were developed in-house. That vertical-integration story is politically significant in Beijing, where independence from foreign tooling has become a strategic priority following U.S. export controls.
Origin says the machine will be opened to commercial users in chemistry simulation, AI-model optimisation, finance and smart-grid analytics. The previous Wukong recorded 50 million remote accesses from more than 160 countries since its 2024 launch; the company hopes Wukong-180 will both extend that user base and shorten the latency between research demos and paying workloads.
- supply chain
- the network of companies that make and deliver a product
- predecessor
- the thing that came before something else
- fidelity
- how closely a quantum operation matches the ideal
- calibration
- the careful adjustment of a system to ensure accurate results
- vertical integration
- when one company controls many stages of producing a product
- export controls
- government rules limiting which technology can be sent abroad
- cryogenic
- involving very low temperatures
- latency
- a delay between an action and a result
Level 4 — Advanced
Origin Quantum, China's most prolific superconducting-quantum builder, unveiled its fourth-generation processor, Wukong-180, on 9 May 2026 from its Hefei base in Anhui Province. The new machine couples 180 computational transmons to 251 tunable couplers, a connectivity-rich architecture that the company says yields 99.9% single-qubit gate fidelity, 99% two-qubit gate fidelity and 99% measurement fidelity — performance metrics that, if independently corroborated, place the system in the upper tier of operational NISQ-era hardware.
Crucially, Origin reports that the chip, control electronics, dilution-refrigerator infrastructure and operating system were all developed domestically, a vertical-integration profile aligned with Beijing's drive to neutralise the impact of expanding U.S. export controls. Western competitors retain advantages in certain sub-components — most notably arbitrary-waveform generators and Josephson parametric amplifiers — but the gap has narrowed materially since the 72-qubit Wukong launched in early 2024.
Application targeting is deliberately broad: AI-model optimisation, quantum chemistry, derivatives pricing, smart-grid scheduling and even pharmaceutical screening. Origin's previous-generation cloud platform handled roughly 50 million remote accesses and 900,000 jobs from 160-plus countries between January 2024 and April 2026, providing a real-world baseline against which Wukong-180's commercial uptake will be benchmarked.
Read in context with the 50-qubit JUPITER simulation milestone of 11 May and the 5,000-atom matter-wave interferometry result out of Vienna and Duisburg-Essen on 13 May, Wukong-180 contributes to a thickening narrative of incremental but unmistakable quantum maturation in May 2026. The harder question — when, if ever, the field crosses provable quantum advantage on a commercially relevant workload — remains open, but the hardware substrate is unmistakably becoming richer.
- transmon
- a common type of superconducting qubit based on a Josephson junction
- tunable coupler
- a qubit-mediated element used to switch interactions on and off
- NISQ-era
- the current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum stage of development
- vertical integration
- controlling several stages of producing a product within one company
- Josephson parametric amplifier
- a low-noise amplifier used in superconducting qubit readout
- derivatives pricing
- calculating the value of complex financial contracts
- matter-wave interferometry
- an experiment that exploits the wave behaviour of massive particles
- quantum advantage
- a quantum computer doing a useful task faster than any classical one
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