Spikes meet Spins: Quantum-Native Neural Decoding for Ultra-Low-Latency Brain–Computer Interfaces

Brain – computer interfaces (BCIs) require rapid and accurate decoding of neural activity, yet conventional computing architectures face growing latency as neural recording scales. We demonstrate a quantum computing – enabled neural decoding approach using a physical 1000-qubit coherent photonic Ising machine, in which inference is performed through hardware energy relaxation rather than numerical computation. By mapping sparse neural spike patterns onto Ising Hamiltonians, our hardware-native Quantum Semi-Restricted Boltzmann Machine achieves up to 96.2% accuracy across public in vivo datasets spanning multiple species and modalities. We report hardware-verified median latencies of 0.075 ms— a tenfold speedup over GPUs—with complexity-invariant scaling. These results establish quantum computing as a viable pathway toward ultra-low-latency neural decoding for future BCI systems.