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AQT Joins €122 Million Project to Build German Quantum Computer

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September 29, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space will invest €122 million in a project to build one of Europe’s most advanced quantum computers, with AQT selected as one of seven key partners. The consortium, led by QUDORA under the NFQC-1k project, aims to create a demonstrator with at least 1,000 physical qubits and 50 logical qubits.

“We are proud to be part of a major new German quantum computing initiative,” said a representative from AQT, which will contribute its expertise in trapped-ion quantum computing to the five-year effort. The project also includes plans for a pilot production line for ion-trap quantum processor units.

AQT Partners in €122 Million NFQC-1k Quantum Computer Project

AQT will contribute to the development of a trapped-ion quantum computer as one of seven members in a consortium building a European quantum computer. Hannover, Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, and NXP Semiconductors Germany GmbH are also partners in the initiative, uniting research institutions and industry. This collaboration provides an opportunity to apply its expertise to a landmark project advancing quantum computing. The company recently achieved a Quantum Volume of 32768 with its new LYNX Series, 19-inch rack-mounted quantum computers, which represents a milestone for a universal Quantum Computer designed, built, and located in Europe, AQT says.

AQT is also collaborating with Horizon Quantum to accelerate the development of real-world quantum applications by combining with Horizon’s software. On May 27th, 2026, the CHAMP-ION consortium held its international opening event in Villach, Austria, bringing together leading stakeholders from across the European quantum technologies ecosystem.

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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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