Open Quantum Insights · Edition 001 · Summer 2026
The seasonal report measured from the circuits themselves, across six QPUs from four hardware vendors. Not a survey, not a forecast: the real workload record.
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Open Quantum Insights is a seasonal report on real quantum computing usage on Open Quantum, published by Quantum Rings. It is measured, not surveyed: every number comes from the structure of the circuits people actually ran. This edition covers June through August 2026.
From jobs on the platform's Public Plan, where circuits run on real hardware from Rigetti, IonQ, IQM, and AQT at free or reduced cost in exchange for sharing execution data. Privately run circuits are excluded, and volumes are reported as shares and growth rates.
“Most writing about quantum computing describes what the hardware could do. This report describes what people actually do with it, measured from the circuits themselves, not from a survey.”
|01⟩
The median circuit on the network uses 6 qubits. The 95th percentile reached 96 qubits, up from 20 the season before, past the edge of brute-force statevector simulation on any supercomputer. Jobs at 50 or more qubits grew from 2% to 11% of the parsed corpus.
“The median circuit is 6 qubits: people are learning. The 95th percentile is 96: the frontier of what they are reaching for jumped nearly five-fold in a season, right past the edge of brute-force statevector simulation on any supercomputer.”
|02⟩
Median in-window time from job submission to execution start is 2 minutes or less on every system. The hours-long queues most researchers have lived with come from IBM's cloud, and they are a story of concentration, not capability: when the entire field defaults to one fleet, that fleet becomes a victim of its own success. Spread the same demand across a multi-vendor fleet and the line all but disappears.
“The hours-long quantum queue of popular imagination is not a property of quantum hardware; it is a property of concentration on one oversubscribed fleet. On this network, hardware is a submit-inspect-resubmit instrument you can iterate against over coffee.”
|03⟩
Retail per-shot pricing across the fleet spans a 188x range, and 57% of jobs ran on the most aggressively priced system, Rigetti Cepheus-1-108Q. Demand concentrates where the price is lowest, while premium trapped-ion systems carry the deepest, fidelity-critical work at up to 10-minute executions.
These are 3 of 20 figures. The full report goes system by system.
Get the PDFA sample of what the full report covers, each with the figures to back it up:
The real workload mix: benchmarks, textbook algorithms, and the circuits no textbook describes
Where declared research categories diverge from what the circuits actually do
Submission surfaces compared: SDKs, the web portal, and AI agents over MCP
Shot counts in practice, from the typical job to the ones that hit the cap
The different work trapped-ion and superconducting machines attract
What circuit complexity does, and does not do, to execution time
The geography of usage: where the users are versus where the jobs run
Usage concentration across organizations, and where the heavy users came from
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Edition 001 · Summer 2026 · Published September 1, 2026
Questions about the methodology, arguments with the findings, ideas for what the next edition should measure — bring them to the Quantum Rings community. Argue with our bottom lines; that is what they are for.
“Open Quantum Insights, Edition 001 · Summer 2026.” Quantum Rings. Published September 1, 2026. https://www.openquantum.com/insights/2026-summer
Presenting at a conference? All figures may be reproduced with the credit line “Source: Open Quantum Insights, Edition 001 (Summer 2026).”
A seasonal, data-driven report on real quantum computing usage, published by Quantum Rings on its Open Quantum platform. It is measured from the quantum circuits users actually submitted across six QPU systems from four hardware vendors: Rigetti, IonQ, IQM, and AQT. It is not a survey.
From the Public Plan of the Open Quantum platform, where users run circuits on real quantum hardware at free or reduced cost in exchange for sharing execution data. Privately run circuits are excluded. The Summer 2026 edition draws on jobs run by hundreds of active users across 47 countries. Volume figures are reported as shares and growth rates.
Every season, on the first Tuesday of the month after the season closes. The cadence follows the meteorological seasons, chosen for alignment with the academic calendar. Edition 001 covers June through August 2026 and published on September 1, 2026.
Cite this edition as: "Open Quantum Insights, Edition 001, Summer 2026." Quantum Rings. Published September 1, 2026. https://www.openquantum.com/insights/2026-summer
In the Quantum Rings community, at https://www.quantumrings.com/community. Discussion of the report, questions about the methodology, and follow-ups all belong there — reader questions help shape future editions.