By Mackenzie Tatananni

D-Wave Quantum said Wednesday that it had sold the world's largest quantum computer to a German research institute, marking a milestone in a highly speculative sector.

With the purchase, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich became the first high-performance computing center in the world to own a D-Wave Advantage quantum computing system.

While quantum players like IBM and IonQ have made headway into Europe, the D-Wave Advantage is the first system in the continent with more than 5,000 qubits, D-Wave said.

Qubits, or quantum bits, are the basic units of information in quantum computing systems. They can take the form of quantum particles like ions or electrons.

In an interview with Barron's, D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz explained that the company was able to maximize the number of qubits by taking a different approach than IonQ, IBM, and Alphabet-owned Google.

While competitors rely on an approach known as gate-based quantum, D-Wave is the only company to use annealing quantum, which doesn't have the same size constraints.

The Jülich UNified Infrastructure for Quantum Computing, a public quantum computing user facility deployed by JSC, will have access to all aspects of the system, including the ability to change parameters.

Researchers ultimately aim to integrate the system with Jupiter, a supercomputer currently being built at JSC, to enable even more powerful computations.

Jupiter, an acronym for "Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research," is what is known as an exascale supercomputer.

Unlike quantum, which is an entirely new approach to computing, exascale computers are similar to the classical systems used today, but far more efficient. An exascale supercomputer can perform one quintillion calculations per second -- that's the number 1 followed by 18 zeros.

Construction on Jupiter began in 2024. Once complete, it will be Europe's first exascale supercomputer. Jupiter is powered by Nvidia's Grace Hopper Superchip, a processor designed for large-scale artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

The union of the two systems will mark the first-ever coupling of an annealing quantum computer with exascale computing, "potentially enabling breakthroughs in areas such as AI and quantum optimization," D-Wave said.

The D-Wave Advantage system has "played a pioneering role in the development of quantum optimization," JSC director Thomas Lippert said in a statement. He cited the computer's applications in research as well as "enterprise-grade solutions across numerous industries."

D-Wave has been commercial since 2011, when it sold the D-Wave One system to Lockheed Martin. Present-day customers include NTT Docomo, Japan's largest telecom provider, and Pattison Food Group, a Canadian supermarket operator.

Write to Mackenzie Tatananni at mackenzie.tatananni@barrons.com

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February 13, 2025 05:00 ET (10:00 GMT)

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