Initiating Impact Today: Combining the World’s Most Powerful in Quantum and Classical Compute
Quantinuum and NVIDIA are reeling in a future where quantum and classical compute power unite to accelerate scientific discovery and unlock enormous commercial value.
Quantinuum and NVIDIA, world leaders in their respective sectors, are combining forces to fast-track commercially scalable quantum supercomputers, further bolstering the announcement Quantinuum made earlier this year about the exciting new potential in Generative Quantum AI.
Make no mistake about it, the global quantum race is on. With over $2 billion raised by companies in 2024 alone, and over 150 new startups in the past five years, quantum computing is no longer restricted to ‘the lab’.
The United Nations proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), and as we march toward the end of the first quarter, the old maxim that quantum computing is still a decade (or two, or three) away is no longer relevant in today’s world. Governments, commercial enterprises and scientific organizations all stand to benefit from quantum computers, led by those built by Quantinuum.
That is because, amid the flurry of headlines and social media chatter filled with aspirational statements of future ambitions shared by those in the heat of this race, we at Quantinuum continue to lead by example. We demonstrate what that future looks like today, rather than relying solely on slide deck presentations.
Our quantum computers are the most powerful systems in the world. Our H2 system, the only quantum computer that cannot be classically simulated, is years ahead of any other system being developed today. In the coming months, we’ll introduce our customers to Helios, a trillion times more powerful than H2, further extending our lead beyond where the competition is still only planning to be.
At Quantinuum, we have been convinced for years that the impact of quantum computers on the real world will happen earlier than anticipated. However, we have known that impact will be when powerful quantum computers and powerful classical systems work together.
This sort of hybrid ‘supercomputer’ has been referenced a few times in the past few months, and there is, rightly, a sense of excitement about what such an accelerated quantum supercomputer could achieve.
The Power of Hybrid Quantum and Classical Compute
In a revolutionary move on March 18th, 2025, at the GTC AI conference, NVIDIA announced the opening of a world-class accelerated quantum research center with Quantinuum selected as a key founding collaborator to work on projects with NVIDIA at the center.
With details shared in an accompanying press statement and blog post, the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center (NVAQC) being built in Boston, Massachusetts, will integrate quantum computers with AI supercomputers to ultimately explore how to build accelerated quantum supercomputers capable of solving some of the world’s most challenging problems. The center will begin operations later this year.
As shared in Quantinuum’s accompanying statement, the center will draw on the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform, alongside a NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system containing 576 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs dedicated to quantum research.
The Role of CUDA-Q in Quantum-Classical Integration
Integrating quantum and classical hardware relies on a platform that can allow researchers and developers to quickly shift context between these two disparate computing paradigms within a single application. NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform will be the entry-point for researchers to exploit the NVAQC quantum-classical integration.
In 2022, Quantinuum became the first company to bring CUDA-Q to its quantum systems, establishing a pioneering collaboration that continues to today. Users of CUDA-Q are currently offered access to Quantinuum’s System H1 QPU and emulator for 90 days.
Quantinuum’s future systems will continue to support the CUDA-Q platform. Furthermore, Quantinuum and NVIDIA are committed to evolving and improving tools for quantum classical integration to take advantage of the latest hardware features, for example, on our upcoming Helios generation.
The Gen-Q-AI Moment
A few weeks ago, we disclosed high level details about an AI system that we refer to as Generative Quantum AI, or GenQAI. We highlighted a timeline between now and the end of this year when the first commercial systems that can accelerate both existing AI and quantum computers.
At a high level, an AI system such as GenQAI will be enhanced by access to information that has not previously been accessible. Information that is generated from a quantum computer that cannot be simulated. This information and its effect can be likened to a powerful microscope that brings accuracy and detail to already powerful LLM’s, bridging the gap from today’s impressive accomplishments towards truly impactful outcomes in areas such as biology and healthcare, material discovery and optimization.
Through the integration of the most powerful in quantum and classical systems, and by enabling tighter integration of AI with quantum computing, the NVAQC will be an enabler for the realization of the accelerated quantum supercomputer needed for GenQAI products and their rapid deployment and exploitation.
Innovating our Roadmap
The NVAQC will foster the tools and innovations needed for fully fault-tolerant quantum computing and will be enabler to the roadmap Quantinuum released last year.
With each new generation of our quantum computing hardware and accompanying stack, we continue to scale compute capabilities through more powerful hardware and advanced features, accelerating the timeline for practical applications. To achieve these advances, we integrate the best CPU and GPU technologies alongside our quantum innovations. Our long-standing collaboration with NVIDIA drives these advancements forward and will be further enriched by the NVAQC.
Here are a couple of examples:
In quantum error correction, error syndromes detected by measuring "ancilla" qubits are sent to a "decoder." The decoder analyzes this information to determine if any corrections are needed. These complex algorithms must be processed quickly and with low latency, requiring advanced CPU and GPU power to calculate and apply corrections keeping logical qubits error-free. Quantinuum has been collaborating with NVIDIA on the development of customized GPU-based decoders which can be coupled with our upcoming Helios system.
In our application space, we recently announced the integration of InQuanto v4.0, the latest version of Quantinuum’s cutting edge computational chemistry platform, with NVIDIA cuQuantum SDK to enable previously inaccessible tensor-network-based methods for large-scale and high-precision quantum chemistry simulations.
Our work with NVIDIA underscores the partnership between quantum computers and classical processors to maximize the speed toward scaled quantum computers. These systems offer error-corrected qubits for operations that accelerate scientific discovery across a wide range of fields, including drug discovery and delivery, financial market applications, and essential condensed matter physics, such as high-temperature superconductivity.
We look forward to sharing details with our partners and bringing meaningful scientific discovery to generate economic growth and sustainable development for all of humankind.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, pioneers powerful quantum computers and advanced software solutions. Quantinuum’s technology drives breakthroughs in materials discovery, cybersecurity, and next-gen quantum AI. With over 500 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, Quantinuum leads the quantum computing revolution across continents.
Quantinuum is focusing on redefining what’s possible in hybrid quantum–classical computing by integrating Quantinuum’s best-in-class systems with high-performance NVIDIA accelerated computing to create powerful new architectures that can solve the world’s most pressing challenges.
The launch of Helios, Powered by Honeywell, the world’s most accurate quantum computer, marks a major milestone in quantum computing. Helios is now available to all customers through the cloud or on-premise deployment, launched with a go-to-market offering that seamlessly pairs Helios with the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform, targeting specific end markets such as drug discovery, finance, materials science, and advanced AI research.
We are also working with NVIDIA to adopt NVIDIA NVQLink, an open system architecture, as a standard for advancing hybrid quantum-classical supercomputing. Using this technology with Quantinuum Guppy and the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform, Quantinuum has implemented NVIDIA accelerated computing across Helios and future systems to perform real-time decoding for quantum error correction.
In an industry-first demonstration, an NVIDIA GPU-based decoder integrated in the Helios control engine improved the logical fidelity of quantum operations by more than 3% — a notable gain given Helios’ already exceptionally low error rate. These results demonstrate how integration with NVIDIA accelerated computing through NVQLink can directly enhance the accuracy and scalability of quantum computation.
This unique collaboration spans the full Quantinuum technology stack. Quantinuum’s next-generation software development environment allows users to interleave quantum and GPU-accelerated classical computations in a single workflow. Developers can build hybrid applications using tools such as NVIDIA CUDA-Q, NVIDIA CUDA-QX, and Quantinuum’s Guppy, to make advanced quantum programming accessible to a broad community of innovators.
The collaboration also reaches into applied research through the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Computing Research Center (NVAQC), where an NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 supercomputer can be paired with Quantinuum’s Helios to further drive hybrid quantum-GPU research, including the development of breakthrough quantum-enhanced AI applications.
A recent achievement illustrates this potential: The ADAPT-GQE framework, a transformer-based Generative Quantum AI (GenQAI) approach, uses a Generative AI model to efficiently synthesize circuits to prepare the ground state of a chemical system on a quantum computer. Developed by Quantinuum, NVIDIA, and a pharmaceutical industry leader—and leveraging NVIDIA CUDA-Q with GPU-accelerated methods—ADAPT-GQE achieved a 234x speed-up in generating training data for complex molecules. The team used the framework to explore imipramine, a molecule crucial to pharmaceutical development. The transformer was trained on imipramine conformers to synthesize ground state circuits at orders of magnitude faster than ADAPT-VQE, and the circuit produced by the transformer was run on Helios to prepare the ground state using InQuanto, Quantinuum's computational chemistry platform.
From collaborating on hardware and software integrations to GenQAI applications, the collaboration between Quantinuum and NVIDIA is building the bridge between classical and quantum computing and creating a future where AI becomes more expansive through quantum computing, and quantum computing becomes more powerful through AI.
By Dr. Noah Berthusen
The earliest works on quantum error correction showed that by combining many noisy physical qubits into a complex entangled state called a "logical qubit," this state could survive for arbitrarily long times. QEC researchers devote much effort to hunt for codes that function well as "quantum memories," as they are called. Many promising code families have been found, but this is only half of the story.
Being able to keep a qubit around for a long time is one thing, but to realize the theoretical advantages of quantum computing we need to run quantum circuits. And to make sure noise doesn't ruin our computation, these circuits need to be run on the logical qubits of our code. This is often much more challenging than performing gates on the physical qubits of our device, as these "logical gates" often require many physical operations in their implementation. What's more, it often is not immediately obvious which logical gates a code has, and so converting a physical circuit into a logical circuit can be rather difficult.
Some codes, like the famous surface code, are good quantum memories and also have easy logical gates. The drawback is that the ratio of physical qubits to logical qubits (the "encoding rate") is low, and so many physical qubits are required to implement large logical algorithms. High-rate codes that are good quantum memories have also been found, but computing on them is much more difficult. The holy grail of QEC, so to speak, would be a high-rate code that is a good quantum memory and also has easy logical gates. Here, we make progress on that front by developing a new code with those properties.
Building on prior error correcting codes
A recent work from Quantinuum QEC researchers introduced genon codes. The underlying construction method for these codes, called the "symplectic double cover," also provided a way to obtain logical gates that are well suited for Quantinuum's QCCD architecture. Namely, these "SWAP-transversal" gates are performed by applying single qubit operations and relabeling the physical qubits of the device. Thanks to the all-to-all connectivity facilitated through qubit movement on the QCCD architecture, this relabeling can be done in software essentially for free. Combined with extremely high fidelity (~1.2 x10-5) single-qubit operations, the resulting logical gates are similarly high fidelity.
Given the promise of these codes, we take them a step further in our new paper. We combine the symplectic double codes with the [[4,2,2]] Iceberg code using a procedure called "code concatenation". A concatenated code is a bit like nesting dolls, with an outer code containing codes within it---with these too potentially containing codes. More technically, in a concatenated code the logical qubits of one code act as the physical qubits of another code.
The new codes, which we call "concatenated symplectic double codes", were designed in such a way that they have many of these easily-implementable SWAP-transversal gates. Central to its construction, we show how the concatenation method allows us to "upgrade" logical gates in terms of their ease of implementation; this procedure may provide insights for constructing other codes with convenient logical gates. Notably, the SWAP-transversal gate set on this code is so powerful that only two additional operations (logical T and S) are necessary for universal computation. Furthermore, these codes have many logical qubits, and we also present numerical evidence to suggest that they are good quantum memories.
Concatenated symplectic double codes have one of the easiest logical computation schemes, and we didn’t have to sacrifice rate to achieve it. Looking forward in our roadmap, we are targeting hundreds of logical qubits at ~ 1x 10-8 logical error rate by 2029. These codes put us in a prime position to leverage the best characteristics of our hardware and create a device that can achieve real commercial advantage.
Every year, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC) brings together the global supercomputing community to explore the technologies driving the future of computing.
Join Quantinuum at this year’s conference, taking place November 16th – 21st in St. Louis, Missouri, where we will showcase how our quantum hardware, software, and partnerships are helping define the next era of high-performance and quantum computing.
Visit Quantinuum in the Expo Hall
The Quantinuum team will be on-site at booth #4432 to showcase how we’re building the bridge between HPC and quantum.
- Live demo unit of our quantum hardware
- Our new Helios replica, providing an up-close look at the design behind our next-generation system
- The Helios chip, highlighting the innovation driving the world’s most advanced trapped-ion quantum computers
On Tuesday and Wednesday, our quantum computing experts will host daily tutorials at our booth on Helios, our next-generation hardware platform, Nexus, our all-in-one quantum computing platform, and Hybrid Workflows, featuring the integration of NVIDIA CUDA-Q with Quantinuum Systems.
Speaking Sessions at SC25
Join our team as they share insights on the opportunities and challenges of quantum integration within the HPC ecosystem:
Panel Session: The Quantum Era of HPC: Roadmaps, Challenges and Opportunities in Navigating the Integration Frontier
November 19th | 10:30 – 12:00pm CST
During this panel session, Kentaro Yamamoto from Quantinuum, will join experts from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, IBM, QuEra, RIKEN, and Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre to explore how quantum and classical systems are being brought together to accelerate scientific discovery and industrial innovation.
BoF Session: Bridging the Gap: Making Quantum-Classical Hybridization Work in HPC
November 19th | 5:15 – 6:45pm CST
Quantum-classical hybrid computing is moving from theory to reality, yet no clear roadmap exists for how best to integrate quantum processing units (QPUs) into established HPC environments. In this Birds of a Feather discussion, co-led by Quantinuum’s Grahame Vittorini and representatives from BCS, DOE, EPCC, Inria, ORNL NVIDIA, and RIKEN we hope to bring together a global community of HPC practitioners, system architects, quantum computing specialists and workflow researchers, including participants in the Workflow Community Initiative, to assess the state of hybrid integration and identify practical steps toward scalable, impactful deployment.