Origin Wukong

Overview

Origin Wukong is the flagship product of Origin Quantum, the Hefei company that is China's best-known commercial maker of quantum computers. It went into operation on January 6, 2024 and is named after Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of Chinese legend, whose famous ability was to take 72 transformations. Wukong's 72 working qubits are a deliberate nod to that number.

The chip is notable for the way it was built. Origin says the processor, the measurement and control electronics, the operating system, and the cloud platform were all developed in-house in China, and the chip was made on a domestic quantum chip production line. The machine is therefore as much a statement about technological self-sufficiency as a performance milestone.

History and background

Origin Quantum was founded in 2017 in Hefei, an Anhui Province city that houses China's national laboratory for quantum information. The company delivered first- and second-generation superconducting quantum computers to Chinese users before the third generation, Wukong, went online in January 2024. At the launch, Guo Guoping, who leads the research team, acknowledged that China still had a gap to close with the world's leading players.

After launch, Wukong attracted large numbers of remote users: reports described several million visits within three months and tens of millions in total from users in well over a hundred countries, though such figures count visits to a web platform rather than quantum jobs. Researchers have used the device for experiments, including a demonstration of a universal logical gate set in error-detecting surface codes. In May 2026 Origin introduced a fourth-generation system, Wukong-180.

How it works

Wukong's qubits and couplers are all flux-tunable transmons with asymmetric SQUID loops, meaning their frequencies can be changed by applying a magnetic flux. The qubits perform computation, and the couplers are tuned to switch the interaction between neighbors on or off. A small interaction window lets two qubits perform a controlled-phase gate, and turning the coupler off isolates them so they do not disturb each other.

The chip uses a flip-chip architecture: the qubit layer and the routing and control layer are on separate dies, bonded face to face. This lets designers place control lines and readout resonators on a different layer from the qubits, easing wiring congestion. Each qubit has individual control lines for microwave rotations and frequency tuning, and its own readout resonator.

In research on Wukong, groups reported that decoherence and microwave crosstalk limit single-qubit gates, while decoherence and leakage from imperfect control limit two-qubit gates. This is common for large superconducting chips and is also true of early versions of IBM and Google devices, so such results should be read as a snapshot of a rapidly changing platform.

Connectivity

Nearest-neighbor square lattice; each pair of neighboring qubits is linked through a tunable coupler

Specifications in detail

Key features

• 72 working qubits and 126 coupler qubits on a single chip (198 elements)
• Made on what Origin Quantum describes as China's first quantum chip production line
• Flip-chip design that separates the qubit layer from the control and routing layer
• Controlled by Origin's third-generation measurement-and-control system, with automated chip testing
• Publicly accessible through a cloud platform

Limitations

• Published fidelity and coherence data are limited and lag the leading Western devices
• In some research experiments only 62 of the 72 qubits were available
• Nearest-neighbor connectivity requires swap operations for many algorithms
• Export controls and geopolitical factors affect supply chains and collaboration

Timeline

What it is used for

• Education and algorithm development through a cloud platform
• Research on error detection, surface codes, and gate calibration
• Experimentation with quantum machine learning and chemistry on a domestic platform

How it compares

• Compared with Google Willow (105 qubits), Wukong has fewer qubits and has published less benchmark data, so its quality is harder to assess.
• Compared with IBM Heron (156 qubits), Wukong is smaller and its public cloud access is on a different platform.
• Compared with Google's 2019 Sycamore (53 qubits), it is a chip of similar scale in qubit count and a similar generation of technology.

Technical notes

The 72 qubits are the computational ones; the 126 additional elements are couplers, which are themselves flux-tunable transmons used to switch interactions between neighboring qubits on and off. The design is a qubit-coupler-qubit unit repeated across a square lattice. A waveguide resonator between neighboring qubits provides capacitive coupling, which allows greater physical separation between qubits and leaves room for routing control lines.

Why it matters

Wukong is the most visible example of a commercially available, domestically built superconducting quantum computer in China. Its progress shows how quickly a national effort can move from a laboratory prototype to a product with a public cloud.

For observers, the most useful questions are about quality: whether gate fidelities and coherence times improve as quickly as qubit counts, and whether the company publishes independent benchmarks. Those answers will decide how competitive Origin can be abroad.

Frequently asked questions

Keep exploring

• Company profile: Origin Quantum
• Related processor: Google Sycamore
• Related processor: IBM Heron (r1, r2, and r3)
• Related processor: IQM Garnet
• Related processor: RIKEN-Fujitsu 64-Qubit Superconducting Quantum Computer

This profile is written for educational purposes and summarizes company announcements, published papers, and vendor specification sheets. Last reviewed: September 30, 2026. Figures marked as company-reported have not all been independently verified, and benchmarks differ between vendors, so compare them with care.

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