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Head to headGoogle vs Quantinuum
Willow against Helios: two of the most talked-about machines, built on very different technologies. Quantinuum leads on accuracy and you can buy time on it; Google leads on landmark experiments and speed. Some of their numbers can't be fairly compared.
Can they be compared? Only partly. Google uses superconducting qubits; Quantinuum uses trapped ions. Accuracy and error-correction results can be compared with care. Speed can't: superconducting chips run operations far faster, while trapped ions are slower but more accurate and let any qubit talk to any other.
Side by side
| Topic | Google Quantum AI | Quantinuum |
|---|---|---|
| Approach | Superconducting, Neutral atom | Trapped ion |
| Most accurate | #3 | #1 |
| Error-corrected qubits | #1 | |
| Most qubits | #3 | #5 |
| Fastest | ||
| Use it today | #2 | |
| Latest machine | Willow (105 qubits, 2024) | Helios (98 qubits, launched November 2025) |
| Can you use it? | No public access; selected research groups only | Yes: Quantinuum's cloud, or installed on site |
| Strongest published result | Error correction below the surface-code threshold (Nature, 2024); "Quantum Echoes" (Nature, 2025) | 99.921% two-qubit accuracy across all 98 qubits; 48 error-corrected logical qubits (company-reported, 2025) |
| Next big promise | A long-lived logical qubit; commercially relevant machines by the end of the decade | Sol (up to 100 logical qubits) in 2027; Apollo (fully fault-tolerant) in 2029 |
How they differ
Google's Willow is a superconducting chip: tiny circuits cooled to near absolute zero. Operations are very fast, but each qubit can only talk directly to its neighbours. Quantinuum's Helios uses trapped ions, single charged atoms held in a vacuum. Operations are much slower, but very accurate, and any qubit can interact with any other.
That's why a straight "which is better?" doesn't work. On speed, Google wins by design. On accuracy across a whole machine, Quantinuum's published numbers are the best in the field.
Who's ahead
Look at the races in the table above, not a single verdict. For a business, the biggest practical difference is access: Quantinuum sells time on Helios, while Willow isn't available outside Google and a few research partners. For science, Google's two Nature papers are among the most important results of recent years, and our Reality Check on Quantum Echoes explains what the second one does and doesn't show.
Bottom line: If you want the most accurate machine you can actually use today, it's Quantinuum. If you want the most significant peer-reviewed physics results, it's Google. They're racing towards the same goal on different tracks.
Sources
- Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip, Google blog, 9 December 2024
- Observation of constructive interference at the edge of quantum ergodicity, Nature, DOI 10.1038/s41586-025-09526-6
- Google expands into neutral-atom quantum computers, Google blog
- Quantinuum announces commercial launch of new Helios quantum computer, Quantinuum, 5 November 2025
- Quantinuum reports second quarter 2026 results, Quantinuum