Quantum News Briefs November 19: Q.ANT Launches First Commercial Photonic Processor-for Energy-Efficient High-Performance Computing & Real-Time AI • IonQ to Advance Hybrid Quantum Computing with New Chemistry Application & NVIDIA CUDA-Q • Quantum Brilliance Announces First Purchase of a Room-Temperature Quantum Accelerator in Europe, Powered by NVIDIA CUDA-Q • Quantum Xchange Receives FIPS 203 Validation for its Key Delivery & Management System Phio TX • Element Six Invests in Lightsynq, a New US Quantum Interconnect Company • Microsoft & Atom Computing Offer Commercial Quantum Machine with Largest Number of Entangled Logical Qubits on Record
Q.ANT Launches First Commercial Photonic Processor – for Energy-Efficient High-Performance Computing and Real-Time AI Applications
Q.ANT, the leading startup for photonic computing, today announced the launch of its first commercial product – a photonics-based Native Processing Unit (NPU) built on the company’s compute architecture LENA – Light Empowered Native Arithmetics. The product is fully compatible with today’s existing computing ecosystem as it comes on the industry-standard PCI-Express. The Q.ANT NPU executes complex, non-linear mathematics natively using light instead of electrons, promising to deliver at least 30 times greater energy efficiency and significant computational speed improvements over traditional CMOS technology. Designed for compute-intensive applications such as AI Inference, machine learning, and physics simulation, the Q.ANT NPU has been proven to solve real-world challenges, including number recognition for deep neural network inference (see the recent press release regardingCloud Access to NPU).
“With our photonic chip technology now available on the standard PCIe interface, we’re bringing the incredible power of photonics directly into real-world applications. For us, this is not just a processor—it’s a statement of intent: Sustainability and performance can go hand in hand,” said Dr. Michael Förtsch, CEO of Q.ANT. “For the first time, developers can create AI applications and explore the capabilities of photonic computing, particularly for complex, nonlinear calculations. For example, experts calculated that one GPT-4 query today uses 10 times more electricity than a regular internet search request. Our photonic computing chips offer the potential to reduce the energy consumption for that query by a factor of 30.”
IonQ to Advance Hybrid Quantum Computing with New Chemistry Application and NVIDIA CUDA-Q
IonQ (NYSE: IONQ), a leader in the quantum computing and networking industry, announced on November 18 the completion of an industry-first demonstration of an end-to-end application workflow that leverages the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform alongside IonQ’s leading quantum computing hardware.
The application demonstrates the seamless integration of the core workflow behind several hybrid quantum-classical approaches to calculate the specific properties of a molecule’s electronic structure. These approaches have potential relevance in many chemistry-focused commercial applications, such as identifying how drug molecules might interact with specific proteins in the human body. The achievement captures IonQ’s interest in developing solutions that combine the benefits of quantum processing units (QPUs) with the accelerated, heterogeneous computing capabilities of the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform.
The demonstration at SC24 showcases a novel way to interrogate the properties of specific molecules in a resource-efficient way that has relevance in larger application workflows pertaining to pharma and other commercial domains. The work also sets the stage for IonQ to accelerate even more powerful ways to model molecular dynamics for future biopharmaceutical applications.
The news reaffirms IonQ’s commitment to developing hardware and software that leverages a combination of quantum and classical computation to enable efficient, performant, robust solutions that can be deployed at commercial scale.
Quantum Brilliance Announces First Purchase of a Room-Temperature Quantum Accelerator in Europe, Powered by NVIDIA CUDA-Q
Quantum Brilliance (QB), a global leader in diamond-based quantum technology, announced on November 18 the first purchase of a room temperature quantum accelerator in the European market by Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF (Fraunhofer IAF) following the company’s participation in a public tender.
QB’s quantum accelerators differ from other quantum mainframe computers by leveraging synthetic diamonds to run at room temperature in any environment without the need for large, expensive and energy-intensive refrigeration units to keep qubits stable.
The purchase of its second-generation Quantum Development Kit (QB-QDK2.0) —a 19” rack-mountable quantum accelerator featuring nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond—enhances QB’s existing software suite at Fraunhofer IAF. This includes the Qristal SDK (open-source) and Qristal Emulator, which allow users to simulate quantum computing back-ends with realistic noise models powered by NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q platform.
Fraunhofer IAF, one of the world’s leading research institutes for synthetic diamonds and their potential use in quantum computing applications, has been collaborating with Quantum Brilliance on multiple projects, including DE BRILL, which focuses on advancing quantum computing technologies using diamond-based qubits. The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) based system, together with the corresponding high-performance computing (HPC) integrated virtual emulation system, will advance the institute’s research infrastructure as part of a comprehensive quantum computing ecosystem.
Quantum Xchange Receives FIPS 203 Validation for its Key Delivery and Management System Phio TX
Quantum Xchange has announced that its Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) key delivery and quantum-safe VPN solution, Phio TX, has successfully completed Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 203 validation testing under the Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP).
FIPS 203, published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on Aug. 13, 2024, is one of the new PQC standards aimed at replacing existing quantum-vulnerable encryption algorithms that provide the indispensable security underpinning the modern networked world – from e-commerce, to privacy protection, trusted software distribution, and the coming decentralized Web3.
While many of the threats to security and privacy from quantum computing remain an issue for the not-so-distant future, network users are vulnerable to cryptography’s single points of failure and harvest now, decrypt later attacks that are happening now. The publication of the FIPS PQC standards has government agencies and commercial businesses beginning to implement PQC solutions today. Now, they have the industry’s first FIPS 203 validated, end-to-end PQC security solution in Phio TX to ease this effort.
Element Six Invests in Lightsynq, a New US Quantum Interconnect Company
Element Six (E6) announced on November 19 its investment into Lightsynq, a new US-based quantum interconnect company. Lightsynq is a new startup company founded by Harvard PhD’s and former research leads at the AWS Center for Quantum Networking (CQN). Since 2015, Element Six had fostered a long-standing research collaboration with Lightsynq founders’ team, then continued under the AWS CQN, with the aim to drive growth for these novel technologies.
In recent years, scientific research has focused on single, small-scale quantum computers to unlock higher processing capabilities. However, due to the technical challenges associated with scaling individual systems, including error rates and limited qubit numbers, this technology has not yet been widely deployed in real-world commercial applications.
“E6’s engineered materials will allow Lightsynq to build faster and more robust solutions to unlock several factors of computational capabilities in sectors such as chemistry and cybersecurity,” said Siobhán Duffy, CEO of Element Six. “Leveraging over 70 years of technical leadership in diamond innovation and our advanced synthetic diamond manufacturing facility, based in Oregon, US, our investment in Lightsynq aligns with De Beers Group’s ‘Origins’ strategy, which sees synthetic diamond solutions as a key enabler in today’s and tomorrow’s industrial applications.”
While usually colourless, diamonds can be found in a range of colours in nature. In technological applications, different diamond colours are linked to different characteristics, including one which allows these engineered materials to act as a quantum memory chip. Thanks to the stability of their properties and the ability to interact with light, synthetic diamonds provide all the tools needed to create complex quantum connections.
Microsoft & Atom Computing Offer Commercial Quantum Machine with Largest Number of Entangled Logical Qubits on Record
Microsoft and Atom Computing have made rapid progress in reliable quantum computing by creating and entangling 24 logical qubits made from neutral atoms—they have also demonstrated the ability to detect and correct errors, and perform computation, on 28 logical qubits. Krysta Svore, Technical Fellow, Advanced Quantum Development, Quantum at Microsoft explains this development on her November 19 blog post.
Together, the companies are offering a reliable quantum machine built with these state-of-the-art logical qubits and Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization system, and integrated with Azure 
Elements. This comprehensive package is available to order today with delivery in 2025. The results reported here showcase the advances being made toward scientific quantum advantage, which will require not only reliable quantum computation, but also integration with AI and high-performance computing.
