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D-Wave recently held its annual Qubits Conference to an audience of a few hundred in-person attendees live and many hundreds more viewing by video. The general mood was upbeat with the company management providing an update on their technical roadmap and also a large number of sessions including talks from over a dozen end users about their projects. We will report on some of the highlights including details they revealed about their development roadmap and additional comments describing some of the other strengths the company has for providing a complete, easy-to-use, offering to their customers. Quantum Annealing Hardware Roadmap D-Wave has [...]

The EuroQCS-France consortium, led by GENCI and CEA, has enabled remote access to a 12-qubit photonic quantum processor developed by Quandela. This system, now available to European researchers, is architecturally aligned with the forthcoming Lucy system to be deployed at TGCC (Très Grand Centre de Calcul), CEA’s computing center, by the end of 2025. Early access allows users to begin running applications on real hardware using Quandela’s Perceval programming environment. The initiative builds on a previous deployment of a 6-qubit system and was facilitated by EuroHPC JU’s selection of Quandela and attocube systems AG as the technology providers for EuroQCS-France. Application [...]

The Australian government has invested $15 million AUD ($9.06 million USD) in Canberra-based QuintessenceLabs through the National Reconstruction Fund (NRF), leading a $20 million AUD ($12.08 million USD) funding round. The investment is intended to support domestic manufacturing, international expansion, and continued development of the company’s quantum-resilient cybersecurity technologies. This is the NRF’s eighth investment to date, and its second in quantum technology, following a $13 million AUD ($7.85 million USD) investment in Quantum Brilliance in December 2024. QuintessenceLabs produces both hardware and software for encryption systems based on quantum physics, including quantum random number generators (QRNGs) and secure key management [...]

SandboxAQ has closed a $450 million Series E funding round, bringing its total capital raised to over $950 million since its 2022 spinout from Alphabet. New investors include Google, NVIDIA, BNP Paribas, Ray Dalio, and Horizon Kinetics, alongside existing backers such as Breyer Capital, T. Rowe Price, Paladin Capital, and Eric Schmidt. The round strengthens SandboxAQ’s position in building enterprise platforms that integrate AI and quantum techniques. At the core of its offering are Large Quantitative Models (LQMs), a class of AI models trained on physics, chemistry, and mathematics rather than text or language. These models are designed to simulate and [...]

Introduction The quantum technology landscape has evolved rapidly in Q1 2025, with significant developments across major ecosystems worldwide. This analysis integrates key advancements to date with critical watchpoints for the remainder of the year. United States DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) has made substantial progress with Microsoft and PsiQuantum advancing to Stage C validation in February 2025. The program expanded dramatically on April 3, 2025, when DARPA announced 15 new companies selected for Stage A contracts, with three more pending finalization, bringing the total of new awardees to 18. Stage A contracts involve a six-month "sprint" for companies to develop plans [...]

An international team led by QuTech has demonstrated a three-site Kitaev chain built from quantum dots in a hybrid InSb/Al nanowire. Compared to two-site versions, the extended device showed significantly improved stability of zero-energy Majorana modes (MZMs), attributed to suppressed mode overlap and reduced sensitivity to local perturbations. The chain satisfies key conditions of the Kitaev model, with spinless fermions coupled through superconducting pairing and electron hopping. Fabrication involved electrostatic gating to define three quantum dots, which were coupled via superconducting segments to emulate a topological chain. Earlier results from two-site configurations exhibited unstable MZMs, dubbed “poor man’s Majoranas.” By scaling [...]

The Albert Einstein Jewish Brazilian Hospital in São Paulo has initiated a quantum computing research program to support pharmaceutical development, genomics, and diagnostic innovation. The project is led by UNESP professor Felipe Fanchini and aims to establish a dedicated quantum group within the hospital’s research center, leveraging quantum methods to address biomedical problems through collaboration across physics, engineering, and data science. The initiative includes a partnership with the startup QuaTI, co-founded by Fanchini, which is applying hybrid quantum-classical machine learning and optimization algorithms to model extreme weather conditions. A prototype rainfall data station has been deployed in São Carlos, Brazil, as [...]

Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic have developed a hybrid quantum-classical machine learning model to predict proton affinities (PAs) of molecules with improved efficiency and competitive accuracy. The model, described in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, integrates classical molecular descriptors with quantum circuits serving as feature encoders, offering a practical approach compatible with current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. The team trained classical ensemble models on over 1,100 molecules using a feature set of 186 descriptors, achieving a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.47 kcal/mol—within experimental uncertainty. To reduce complexity, they encoded subsets of these features into quantum states using [...]

Switzerland has announced it will broaden its export controls to encompass a range of dual-use emerging technologies, including quantum computing, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and additive manufacturing. The move is intended to align Swiss export policies with international standards and reflects growing global concern over the potential military and national security applications of quantum and other advanced technologies. The government plans to issue a detailed list specifying the controlled items in the near future. The decision follows similar regulatory steps taken by the United States and the European Union. In September 2024, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) [...]

IBM has launched Qiskit SDK v2.0, a major update that introduces foundational changes to the quantum software stack, including the first version of a C-language API, deeper integration of Rust-based internals, and removal of legacy components. The release aligns with Qiskit’s 18-month major version support cycle and reflects IBM’s strategic effort to enhance performance, improve interoperability with high-performance computing (HPC), and simplify the development of quantum-classical hybrid applications. A key feature of v2.0 is the new C API for constructing and manipulating SparseObservable objects. This early-stage interface allows C programs to interface directly with Qiskit data structures and is part of [...]