NISQ stands for Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum. The term, coined by physicist John Preskill in 2018, describes the current generation of quantum computers. These machines operate with anywhere from tens to a few hundred qubits, and their qubits remain susceptible to noise and prone to errors because they lack full quantum error correction.
NISQ devices are valuable for developing and testing quantum algorithms, even though they cannot yet run the long, deep circuits that error correction will eventually allow. Algorithms designed for this era, such as QAOA and the Variational Quantum Eigensolver, are built to tolerate a degree of noise by keeping circuits short and offloading part of the work to a classical computer.
The NISQ era is best understood as a stepping stone. The lasting goal is fault-tolerant quantum computing, which requires far larger qubit counts and active error correction. Quantum Motion’s focus on manufacturing spin qubits at scale is aimed squarely at moving beyond NISQ toward the million-qubit systems that useful, error-corrected computing will demand.