Italy's first quantum annealer: D-Wave machine with 4,400 qubits arrives in Como
Quantum computer maker D-Wave has delivered an Advantage2 system to Lake Como. It is due to be officially inaugurated on Friday – funded with 10 million euros.
Symbolic image · Photo: Oleg Alexandrov / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
The Canadian-American manufacturer D-Wave has delivered Italy's first annealing quantum computer. The Advantage2 system with more than 4,400 qubits has arrived at Villa Saporiti in Como, Lombardy, where it awaits installation. It is funded by the Swiss company Swiss Quantum Technology (SQT) under an agreement worth 10 million euros. SQT thereby secures half of the computing capacity for five years and holds an option to buy the entire system.
Annealing quantum computers specialise in optimisation tasks, such as planning processes in industry and logistics, and in materials simulation. Once set up, universities, research institutions and companies will be able to use the machine on site or via D-Wave's Leap cloud service. D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz called it a 'historic milestone' for Italy.
The official inauguration is planned for Friday, 16 October, at an event of the Q-Alliance initiative at Villa Saporiti. Within this network, the machine is called VoltaB1 – a nod to the Como-born physicist Alessandro Volta, the 200th anniversary of whose death falls in 2027. It follows the signing of a 'Volta Declaration' in Milan in June, which provides for cooperation on quantum computing, AI and sovereign European computing infrastructure.