Technology leader IBM has announced the expansion of two long-standing academic research partnerships in India with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. Building upon joint initiatives established in 2018 and 2021, the expanded research agenda focuses on quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) workflows, hybrid Quantum-HPC algorithms, agentic AI, and sovereign Indic language models.
The IISc collaboration concentrates on hybrid quantum-classical computing architectures and algorithm development. Researchers from IBM Research India and IISc are co-designing quantum subspace iteration methods that integrate classical approximation-tolerant diagonalization algorithms. These hybrid schemes are engineered to improve execution efficiency across classical supercomputing clusters and IBM quantum processing units (QPUs), while optimizing automated workload orchestration across cloud-native environments.
| [ IBM Academic Research Initiatives: IISc & IIT Bombay Pillars ] | ||
|---|---|---|
| Institution Partner | Primary Research Pillar | Technical Focus & Algorithmic Deliverables |
| • Indian Institute of Science (IISc) | • Quantum Computing & Quantum-HPC Orchestration | • Hybrid quantum subspace iteration methods using approximation-tolerant classical diagonalization; agentic cloud orchestration |
| • Indian Institute of Science (IISc) | • AI for Scientific & Energy Applications | • Time-series foundation models based on IBM Granite for energy analytics, load disaggregation, and forecasting |
| • IIT Bombay | • Sovereign & Indic Language Models | • Model adaptation and optimization for Indian regional languages; multimodal AI for software engineering and education |
| • IIT Bombay | • Intelligent AI Infrastructure | • Optimized AI runtimes, distributed inference, and scalable enterprise knowledge retrieval across hybrid cloud networks |
Concurrently, the IIT Bombay collaboration focuses on sovereign AI infrastructure, optimizing large language model (LLM) runtimes, and adapting multimodal AI models for Indic languages. By combining IISc’s computational science capabilities and IIT Bombay’s AI systems research with IBM’s hardware and hybrid cloud stack, the partnerships aim to align advanced quantum and AI software frameworks with national technology initiatives.
Review the full release via the IBM India Newsroom here.
October 3, 2026