IBM is taking quantum computing to the next level with a new 433-qubit processor and plans for what the company calls “the next wave in quantum computing.”

Quantum computing, at its most basic, is a way to process immense amounts of data very, very quickly. It’s not something we’ll see on our home computers anytime soon, but it’s being used by large companies to map out a number of improvements to travel, manufacturing, and so on. But the technology has made great strides in recent years, and IBM has revealed that it has (or will make) a few more big strides.

The recently unveiled IBM Osprey processor claims to have nearly 3.5x the power of 2021’s IBM Eagle processor, managing 433 quantum bits (qubits) versus the older model’s 127. According to IBM, “the number of classical bits that would be required to represent a state on the IBM Osprey processor far exceeds the total number of atoms in the known universe.” In other words, this single processor can process an exponentially large amount of data compared to a consumer-level system.

Then there’s the IBM Quantum System Two, a quantum system designed to handle more than 4,000 qubits at once. That’s pretty powerful in its own right, but the real goal behind it is modularity. The IBM Quantum System Two can swap out hardware and even connect to multiples of itself to handle more than 16,000 qubits. It’s the kind of processing power that could lead to huge leaps in virus sequencing, air traffic management, supply chain efficiency, and more.