Welinq has announced the first commercial sale of its QDrive quantum memory system to the Institute of Physics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The system will be integrated into the Slovak Quantum Communication Infrastructure (skQCI), a national initiative contributing to the broader EuroQCI framework for secure, continent-wide quantum networking. This transaction marks the transition of Welinq’s neutral-atom storage technology from advanced research to a deployable infrastructure component within an operational network.
The QDrive system is a fully integrated, rack-mountable unit that operates at room temperature, eliminating the requirement for complex cryogenic cooling. It utilizes laser-cooled clouds of Rubidium-87 atoms to store and retrieve quantum information on demand. The system has demonstrated world-record performance for commercial quantum memory, including a storage-and-retrieval efficiency exceeding 90% for single photons and storage durations of up to 200 microseconds. These capabilities are essential for overcoming the distance limitations of optical fibers by enabling the buffering and synchronization of quantum states across network nodes.
Strategically, the deployment within the skQCI project supports Slovakia’s objective of establishing a resilient quantum-secure backbone for critical national institutions, including the Presidential Palace and the National Security Authority. For Welinq, a spin-off from Sorbonne University, the sale validates its hardware-software co-design strategy. Beyond secure communications, Welinq’s roadmap focuses on the development of “quantum-augmented data centers,” where QDrive units will serve as the interconnect backbone for distributed quantum computing architectures, facilitating resource sharing between isolated quantum processing units (QPUs).
Read the official announcement from Welinq here and technical specifications for the QDrive system here.
January 13, 2026
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