Pangaea Quantum Bus Cuts Required Qubits Tenfold on Superconducting Hardware

An Israeli startup has published a peer-reviewed architecture paper arguing that the quantum computing industry's decade-long obsession with raw qubit counts is solving the wrong problem — and that a different architectural approach can reach the same fault-tolerant milestones with one-tenth the hardware. Qarakal Quantum, a Tel Aviv-based full-stack quantum computing company, today released a preprint on arXiv describing its Pangaea architecture paper (paper 2608.01887), which the company claims achieves fault-tolerant quantum computation using up to ten times fewer physical qubits than conventional planar surface-code designs at equivalent error rates. The paper was submitted to arXiv on August 3 and is co-authored by Sheir Yarkoni, Chen Scheim, Daniel Hakshuri, and Nadav Katz — all researchers at Qarakal Quantum. Katz holds a dual appointment as Professor of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Racah Institute, where he leads the Quantum Coherence Lab and previously directed the university's Quantum Information Science Center, in addition to serving as CTO and co-founder of Qarakal Quantum. The announcement stands out in a field where progress is typically measured by chip size. Qarakal's move — leading with a theoretical architecture paper rather than a qubit-count milestone or a prototype chip — reflects what the company…