Rigetti Computing

Rigetti Computing is a quantum-computing company that builds gate-model quantum computers from superconducting qubits. Founded in 2013 by Chad Rigetti, who had previously worked on superconducting qubits at IBM, and based in Berkeley, California, it is a full-stack company: it designs its processors, fabricates them in its own facility, and provides cloud access to them.

#Full-stack approach

Rigetti's distinguishing feature is that it operates its own superconducting-chip fabrication facility, often referred to as Fab-1, rather than relying entirely on external foundries. Owning fabrication lets the company iterate on qubit designs and packaging in-house. Its stack spans chip design and manufacturing, the cryogenic and control systems that operate the processors, and the software layer used to compile and run circuits. This end-to-end control is the company's stated strategy for improving performance across the hardware and software boundary.

#Processors and connectivity

Rigetti names its processors in generations. The Aspen family used fixed connectivity graphs, and the current line is the Ankaa series, including Ankaa-2 and Ankaa-3, which use a square-lattice layout with tunable couplers intended to raise two-qubit gate fidelity. The company has also offered a smaller commercial quantum processing unit, Novera, for on-premises use by research groups. As with all superconducting systems, qubits are laid out on a fixed grid, so interactions between distant qubits must be routed through neighbors, and performance depends heavily on gate fidelity and coherence rather than qubit count alone. As of early 2026, Rigetti's systems remain research and early-application machines.

#Cloud access

Rigetti offers access to its processors through Quantum Cloud Services (QCS), which lets users compile and submit circuits and integrate quantum steps into classical workflows. The company developed the Quil instruction language and the pyQuil library for programming its machines, tools built around this hybrid model. Pairing a classical host with a quantum processor reflects the company's focus on near-term applications that combine both, in which a classical computer handles most of the work and offloads specific subroutines to the quantum device.

#Status

Rigetti's machines are noisy intermediate-scale devices; the company has not reported a fault-tolerant processor or a demonstrated advantage on a practical problem. Progress in the superconducting field, including Quantum error correction milestones from other groups, applies in principle to Rigetti's architecture, but scaling to error-corrected logical qubits remains an open engineering program here as across the industry.

#Relation to cryptography

Rigetti builds universal gate-model machines, so a sufficiently large and error-corrected successor could in principle run Shor's algorithm. Current Ankaa-class devices are far too small and are not error-corrected at scale, so they pose no near-term threat to deployed cryptography and are not relevant to Q-Day on their own. Rigetti's role in the long-run picture, like that of other superconducting groups, depends on whether its in-house fabrication can raise gate fidelity and qubit counts far enough to support error-corrected machines, which remains unproven as of early 2026.