European Commission Providing 3 Million Euro Grant for a New European Quantum Annealer Project

The AVaQus project will be coordinated by the newly created Quantum Computing Technologies group at the High Energy Physics Institute  (IFAE) and is the first European-funded large-scale project on quantum annealing. The total amount of funding is 3 million Euros (about $3.25M USD) over a 3 year period. There are eight partners in this project including five research centers and three startups including:

1. Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE), Barcelona (Spain), acting as the coordinator of AVaQus

2. Karlrsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), Karlsruhe (Germany)

3. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Grenoble (France)

4. University of Glasgow (UG), Glasgow (UK)

5. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Madrid (Spain)

6. Delft Circuits (DELFT), Delft (The Netherlands)

7. Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech, S.L. (QILI), Barcelona (Spain)

8. HQS Quantum Simulations (HQS), Karlsruhe (Germany)

The key focus of this project will be to develop quantum annealing technology that has substantially better coherence times and qubit-qubit connectivity than current quantum annealers. The participants in this project believe that their quantum annealing technology may become a promising alternative to gate-based NISQ quantum computers for achieving useful applications in the short-to-medium term. The initial goal will be to demonstrate this with a five qubit prototype, but we expect the technology will be developed so it can be rapidly scaled to higher qubit counts afterwards. For additional information, you can view the news release announcing the project here and you can also visit the AVaQus web site here.

April 2, 2020