As it pursues its goal of producing a fault-tolerant quantum computer, IBM today announced that it has achieved another milestone: It has successfully joined two cryogenic modules to create a single environment designed, it said, “to scale into the modular, shared, and ultra-cold system required to link hundreds of quantum chips into a more powerful quantum computer.” The company plans to deliver the fault-tolerant IBM Quantum Starling system, capable of running circuits composed of 100 million quantum gates on 200 logical qubits, in 2029. It is investing $10 billion to create and commercialize the necessary technology. The pair of cryogenic modules together stand more than 8 feet tall and is 8 feet wide, and testing showed that they can cool to 4 degrees Kelvin (-452.5 Fahrenheit), about the temperature of liquid helium, in under five days, and can achieve an even more frigid final temperature of below 15 millikelvin (-459.6 Fahrenheit) shortly thereafter.

Full report : IBM’s modular cryogenic fridges will let hundreds of processors be connected into larger systems.