IQM CEO Jan Goetz Highlights How Quantum–HPC Integration Is Moving From Theory to Deployment
At Quantum World Congress 2025, IQM Quantum Computers CEO and Co-Founder Jan Goetz offered a detailed look at what it actually takes to embed quantum computers directly into high-performance computing (HPC) environments — and why true quantum advantage will depend on deep collaboration between both communities.
Goetz emphasized that IQM approaches integration not as an abstract research project but as a product-driven engineering effort, placing full-stack quantum systems directly inside global supercomputing centers. IQM’s Radiance quantum computer — the company’s flagship, upgrade-ready platform — now serves as the primary engine for these deployments, allowing HPC centers to evolve quantum capacity in parallel with their classical roadmaps.
He noted that IQM’s expansion has been global, reflecting partnerships with leaders such as CSC’s LUMI in Finland, LRZ in Munich, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States. Across all sites, IQM has focused on designing systems that physically and operationally fit directly into traditional HPC environments, including 19-inch footprint compatibility, modular cryogenics, and rack-level electronics.
“Quantum and HPC aren’t competing technologies. They’re already working hand-in-hand, and the biggest breakthroughs come from integrating both sides of the stack.”
A major theme of the talk was scaling without sacrificing fidelity. Goetz showcased IQM’s progress toward maintaining >99.9% fidelities across all basic chip operations — single-qubit gates, two-qubit gates, readout, and reset — even as qubit counts increase. This stability enables meaningful steps toward error correction, particularly when combined with IQM’s advances in high-connectivity chip architectures. One qubit now interfaces with up to 24 neighbors, dramatically reducing the number of physical qubits required for a logical qubit — a 10–20× improvement over surface-code approaches.
Goetz also described how IQM’s in-house fabrication facility and proprietary design software allow the company to run extremely fast innovation cycles, taping out new chips every few weeks and relying heavily on HPC simulations to refine coupling elements, idle behavior, and system performance.
The session included concrete examples of hybrid workflows. IQM’s first integration with LUMI used remote coupling for variational algorithms, while the Munich deployment marked the first on-premise installation — proving that floor vibration, temperature shifts, and electromagnetic noise did not degrade performance. IQM also demonstrated molecular ground-state simulations using the quantum device purely as a sampling engine inside a much larger HPC workflow, achieving chemical accuracy with just ~50 lines of code integrating into existing classical pipelines.
Throughout the session, Goetz underscored one central message: real quantum–HPC integration is already happening, and its success depends on transparent collaboration, shared learning, and the recognition that quantum and classical computing will co-evolve — not compete — for years to come.
