Xanadu Aurora

Xanadu Aurora is a photonic quantum computer operated by Xanadu in Canada. It has 12 physical qubits. It ranks 2 of 4 photonic machines in this table by physical qubit count. 8 sourced specs are in the spec sheet. 1 published benchmark or milestone record are listed below, each marked by who measured it.

Aurora is a 12-qubit modular photonic prototype described in Nature in January 2025, made of four networked racks. Xanadu presents it as showing scalability of a networked photonic design; fault-tolerant computation and scaling beyond four racks were not demonstrated. The source does not state where the machine is located or whether outside users have access.

Spec sheet

Technical details as the builder or a paper states them, each with its own source. A blank is a fact we could not source, not a zero. Fidelity and coherence figures are in the benchmark table below.

Spec	Value	Basis	Note	Source
Processor	Aurora: 35 photonic chips, 84 squeezers and 36 photon-number-resolving detectors in four server racks	Peer reviewed	Nature paper calls it a sub-performant scale model; each packaged chip measures 6.2 mm by 4.3 mm; 13 km of fibre links the modules.	nature.com thequantuminsider.com
Qubit type	Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) photonic qubits from squeezed light, 12 physical qubit modes per clock cycle	Peer reviewed	Optical GKP approach: Gaussian boson sampling chips herald non-Gaussian states that are refined and entangled into GKP Bell pairs.	nature.com
Topology	Fibre-networked cluster state on a Raussendorf-Harrington-Goyal lattice across chips and racks	Peer reviewed	Paper reports a cluster state with 86.4 billion modes entangled across separate chips and a foliated distance-2 repetition code with real-time decoding.	nature.com
Native gates	Beamsplitter entangling operations and homodyne measurements with single-clock-cycle feedforward	Peer reviewed	Logic is deterministic linear optics with room-temperature components; photon-number-resolving detection is used to herald input states.	nature.com
Cooling and environment	Room-temperature modules; photon-number-resolving detectors in dilution refrigerators at 12 mK base	Peer reviewed	Nature says the 36 TES detectors sit in a pair of Bluefors LD400 dilution refrigerators; the trade press piece reports only room-temperature operation.	nature.com thequantuminsider.com
Fabrication	Commercially available photonic chip foundry lines (silicon nitride, silicon, germanium); foundry not named	Peer reviewed	Paper says chips used pre-existing commercial fabrication lines with no special loss optimisation; a separate GlobalFoundries partnership targets future Xanadu components.	nature.com thequantuminsider.com
Predecessor	Xanadu Borealis	Vendor reported	Trade press report of Xanadu's Jan 2025 release says Aurora builds on the earlier X8 and Borealis platforms; architecture is different.	thequantuminsider.com
Roadmap	Next-generation architecture targeting up to 100,000 physical and 500 logical qubits in 2029 to 2030	Vendor reported	Stated in Xanadu's 20-F (filed Apr 2026) as attached to an SEC prospectus supplement in Aug 2026; the Jan 2025 Aurora release said the focus is cutting optical loss with foundry partners.	sec.gov thequantuminsider.com

Milestone claims

Xanadu: 12-qubit modular photonic computer, 35 chips and 13 km fibre, published in Nature; fault tolerance not demonstrated (2025-01, vendor reported) thequantuminsider.com

Timeline

2025-01-22: Announced
2025-01: First operational
2025-01-22: Status checked: operational

Comparable photonic machines

Closest in physical qubit count within the same technology. Counts of different qubit types are not interchangeable across technologies.

Machine	Operator	Qubits	Status
Lucy	CEA	12	operational
Quandela Belenos	Quandela	12	operational
Xanadu Borealis	Xanadu	216	decommissioned