Pasqal has officially delivered a state-of-the-art 140-qubit neutral atom quantum computer to the CINECA supercomputing center at the DAMA Technopole in Bologna. This installation marks Italy’s first on-site neutral atom system and is part of a broader European effort to build a sovereign, hybrid infrastructure combining high-performance computing (HPC) with quantum processing units (QPUs). Funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) through the National Center ICSC and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the project aligns with Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) to establish the nation as a strategic global hub for innovation in artificial intelligence and supercomputing.
The new system is specifically engineered for deep integration with Leonardo, one of the world’s most powerful pre-exascale supercomputers. This hybrid architecture allows researchers and industrial users to offload highly complex workloads—such as large-scale optimization, advanced materials simulation, and machine learning—directly to Pasqal’s QPU while utilizing Leonardo for classical data handling and processing. The integration is expected to become fully operational in the coming months, providing the Italian and European scientific communities with a unified platform to tackle challenges that remain computationally intractable for classical systems alone.
As a co-founder of the project and a technology provider for multiple EuroHPC sites, Pasqal now powers three of the eight quantum computers deployed under the Union’s federated infrastructure, including sites in France (CEA/GENCI) and Germany (FZJ). This regional expansion reinforces Europe’s quantum supply chain and its goal of technological sovereignty. By placing these systems in the hands of public operators like CINECA, the initiative ensures that small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and academic researchers have open access to diverse quantum modalities, ranging from analog simulators to digital gate-based systems, accelerating the path toward practical quantum advantage.
For further details, read the official announcement from Pasqal here.
February 17, 2026
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