PsiQuantum today announced a $10.8M contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in Rome, N.Y., continuing a partnership that began in 2022. This phase will give AFRL a design space for comparative quantum circuits on PsiQuantum’s circuit tapeout, part of its ongoing Omega quantum chipset manufacturing with GlobalFoundries. As AFRL’s hardware design partner, PsiQuantum will supply its high-performance Barium Titanate (BTO) Electro-Optic phase shifters and integrate BTO into AFRL-designed optical circuits. PsiQuantum’s 300mm BTO material is believed to be the world’s highest-performing electro-switch material. The company will also provide essential quantum circuit components. Once designed, constructed, and screened for performance, the company will deliver these completed chips to AFRL, who will then validate their capabilities to address other Air Force use cases.

The UK government is investing £121 million in quantum technology to tackle crime, fraud, and money laundering, while reinforcing its global leadership in the field and driving economic savings.

The Integrated Quantum Networks Hub will address the challenges underpinning the establishment of a “quantum internet”, by developing the novel technologies, protocols and industry standards necessary for the deployment of a secure, scalable, quantum communications infrastructure for the UK and beyond.

Nearly 20 quantum computing companies have been chosen to enter the initial stage of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), in which they will characterize their unique concepts for creating a useful, fault-tolerant quantum computer within a decade.

The procurement contract for EuroQCS-Italy, the EuroHPC quantum computer to be located in Italy, has been signed by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and quantum computing company Pasqal, the selected vendor.

Today, ETSI announces the launch of its post-quantum security standard to guarantee the protection of critical data and communications in the future. The specification “Efficient Quantum-Safe Hybrid Key Exchanges with Hidden Access Policies” (ETSI TS 104 015) has been developed to enhance security mechanisms, ensuring that only authorized users with the correct permissions can access sensitive data to decrypt them.

Italian supercomputing centre Cineca today announced an agreement with IQM Quantum Computers, a global leader in superconducting quantum computers, to deliver the most powerful quantum computer in Italy.

NIST has chosen a new algorithm for post-quantum encryption called HQC, which will serve as a backup for ML-KEM, the main algorithm for general encryption.

The Basque Government, and IBM today announced plans to install Europe's first IBM Quantum System Two at the IBM-Euskadi Quantum Computational Center on Ikerbasque Foundation's main campus in San Sebastian, Spain (Gipuzkoa, Spain). The deployment builds on the organizations' partnership, which began in 2023 as part of the BasQ initiative to further establish the Basque Country as a leading technology hub. Since the initial announcement, the parties have agreed to update the original plan to install an IBM Quantum System One, to now deploy IBM's most advanced modular quantum computer, IBM Quantum System Two, which is expected to be complete by the end of 2025.

STMicroelectronics has introduced hardware cryptographic accelerators and associated software libraries for general-purpose and secure microcontrollers, ready for future generations of embedded systems to resist quantum attacks.