A live IBM Quantum check at 00:15 CEST on August 14, 2026 found 264,220 pending jobs across three active 156-qubit systems.
Verified facts
ibm_fez: 96,932 pending jobsibm_kingston: 91,958 pending jobsibm_marrakesh: 75,330 pending jobs
IBM defines pending_jobs as the number of pending jobs on a backend. An archived EduKaizen live check on July 3 recorded 200 pending jobs on Marrakesh. The latest figure is about 377 times higher.
Interpretation
The measurements show a very large increase in queued workloads on Marrakesh and exceptional queue pressure across all three systems. They do not prove that 264,220 people are waiting, or that every job equals one circuit. A Runtime job can contain several vectorized work units, parameter sweeps and many shots. A large submission campaign could therefore create a sharp temporary spike.
The operational signal is nevertheless important: QPU availability, batching and end-to-end throughput are becoming central constraints as quantum workloads grow.
Sources and method
The queue snapshot was retrieved directly with Qiskit Runtime using backend.status(). See IBM’s BackendStatus documentation and its explanation of vectorized Runtime workloads. Queue depths can change from minute to minute.