Quantinuum Introduces First Commercial Application for Quantum Computers
The time when quantum computing was years away from having societal and business impact is now over. Capping two years where Quantinuum introduced multiple technical and commercial advances to lead the quantum computing sector, today we introduce the first commercial application for quantum computers.
Few things are more important to the smooth functioning of our digital economies than trustworthy security. From finance to healthcare, from government to defense, quantum computers provide a means of building trust in a secure future.
Quantinuum and its partners JPMorganChase, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Texas used quantum computers to solve a known industry challenge, generating the “random seeds” that are essential for the cryptography behind all types of secure communication. As our partner and collaborator, JPMorganChase explain in this blog post that true randomness is a scarce and valuable commodity.
This year, Quantinuum will introduce a new product based on this development that has long been anticipated, but until now thought to be some years away from reality.
It represents a major milestone for quantum computing that will reshape commercial technology and cybersecurity: Solving a critical industry challenge by successfully generating certifiable randomness.
Building on the extraordinary computational capabilities of Quantinuum’s H2 System – the highest-performing quantum computer in the world – our team has implemented a groundbreaking approach that is ready-made for industrial adoption. Nature today reported the results of a proof of concept with JPMorganChase, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Texas alongside Quantinuum. It lays out a new quantum path to enhanced security that can provide early benefits for applications in cryptography, fairness, and privacy.
By harnessing the powerful properties of quantum mechanics, we’ve shown how to generate the truly random seeds critical to secure electronic communication, establishing a practical use-case that was unattainable before the fidelity and scalability of the H2 quantum computer made it reliable. So reliable, in fact, that it is now possible to turn this into a commercial product.
Quantinuum will integrate quantum-generated certifiable randomness into our commercial portfolio later this year. Alongside Generative Quantum AI and our upcoming Helios system – capable of tackling problems a trillion times more computationally complex than H2 – Quantinuum is further cementing its leadership in the rapidly-advancing quantum computing industry.
This Matters Because Cybersecurity Matters
Cryptographic security, a bedrock of the modern economy, relies on two essential ingredients: standardized algorithms and reliable sources of randomness – the stronger the better. Non-deterministic physical processes, such as those governed by quantum mechanics, are ideal sources of randomness, offering near-total unpredictability and therefore, the highest cryptographic protection. Google, when it originally announced it had achieved quantum supremacy, speculated on the possibility of using the random circuit sampling (RCS) protocol for the commercial production of certifiable random numbers. RCS has been used ever since to demonstrate the performance of quantum computers, including a milestone achievement in June 2024 by Quantinuum and JPMorganChase, demonstrating their first quantum computer to defy classical simulation. More recently RCS was used again by Google for the launch of its Willow processor.
In today’s announcement, our joint team used the world’s highest-performing quantum and classical computers to generate certified randomness via RCS. The work was based on advanced research by Shih-Han Hung and Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas at Austin, who are co-authors on today’s paper.
Following a string of major advances in 2024 – solving the scaling challenge, breaking new records for reliability in partnership with Microsoft, and unveiling a hardware roadmap, today proves how quantum technology is capable of creating tangible business value beyond what is available with classical supercomputers alone.
What follows is intended as a non-technical explainer of the results in today’s Nature paper.
Certified Randomness: The First Commercial Application for Quantum Computers
For security sensitive applications, classical random number generation is unsuitable because it is not fundamentally random and there is a risk it can be “cracked”. The holy grail is randomness whose source is truly unpredictable, and Nature provides just the solution: quantum mechanics. Randomness is built into the bones of quantum mechanics, where determinism is thrown out the door and outcomes can be true coin flips.
At Quantinuum, we have a strong track record in developing methods for generating certifiable randomness using a quantum computer. In 2021, we introduced Quantum Origin to the market, as a quantum-generated source of entropy targeted at hardening classically-generated encryption keys, using well known quantum technologies that prior to that it had not been possible to use.
In their theory paper, “Certified Randomness from Quantum Supremacy”, Hung and Aaronson ask the question: is it possible to repurpose RCS, and use it to build an application that moves beyond quantum technologies and takes advantage of the power of a quantum computer running quantum circuits?
This was the inspiration for the collaboration team led by JPMorganChase and Quantinuum to draw up plans to execute the proposal using real-world technology. Here’s how it worked:
- The team sent random circuits to Quantinuum’s H2, the world’s highest performing commercially available quantum computer.
- The quantum computer executed each circuit and returned the corresponding sample. The response times were remarkably short, and it could be proven that the circuits could not have been simulated classically within those times, even using the best-known techniques on computing resources greater than those available in the world’s most powerful classical supercomputer.
- The randomness of the returned sample was mathematically certified using Frontier, the world’s most powerful classical supercomputer, establishing it achieved a “passing threshold” on a measure known as the “cross-entropy benchmark”. The better your quantum computer, the higher you can set the “passing threshold”. When the threshold is sufficiently high, "spoofing" the cross-entropy benchmark using only classical methods becomes inefficient.
- Therefore, if the samples are returned quickly and meet the high threshold, the team could be confident that they were generated by a quantum computer – and thus be truly random.
This confirmed that Quantinuum’s quantum computer is not only incapable of being matched by classical computers but can also be used reliably to produce a certifiably random seed from a quantum computer without the need to build your own device, or even trust the device you are accessing.
Looking ahead
The use of randomness in critical cybersecurity environments will gravitate towards quantum resources, as the security demands of end users grows in the face of ongoing cyber threats.
The era of quantum utility offers the promise of radical new approaches to solving substantial and hard problems for businesses and governments.
Quantinuum’s H2 has now demonstrated practical value for cybersecurity vendors and customers alike, where non-deterministic sources of encryption may in time be overtaken by nature’s own source of randomness.
In 2025, we will launch our Helios device, capable of supporting at least 50 high-fidelity logical qubits – and further extending our lead in the quantum computing sector. We thus continue our track record of disclosing our objectives and then meeting or surpassing them. This commitment is essential, as it generates faith and conviction among our partners and collaborators, that empirical results such as those reported today can lead to successful commercial applications.
Helios, which is already in its late testing phase, ahead of being commercially available later this year, brings higher fidelity, greater scale, and greater reliability. It promises to bring a wider set of hybrid quantum-supercomputing opportunities to our customers – making quantum computing more valuable and more accessible than ever before.
And in 2025 we look forward to adding yet another product, building out our cybersecurity portfolio with a quantum source of certifiably random seeds for a wide range of customers who require this foundational element to protect their businesses and organizations.
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.