Cisco has announced a new quantum networking collaboration with Nu Quantum, a UK startup. The partnership with Nu Quantum, based in Cambridge, will see Cisco become a prospective end-user for “Lyra,” a project that aims to deliver the world’s first “Quantum Networking Unit” (QNU.) Funded by a UK government contract valued at £2.3m, the goal is to build a network capable of connecting disparate quantum processing units (QPUs) and massively scale the number of qubits available to researchers and private companies.

QuantWare released the next generation of its off-the-shelf processors, Soprano-D and Contralto-D, in a keynote speech at the Quantum Innovation Summit in Dubai. The upgraded processors feature greatly improved specifications, better reliability and ease of use, and shorter lead times, as well as 6 times more value for money than competing solutions.

JanuD-Wave Quantum announced it has calibrated a 1,200+ qubit Advantage2 prototype, which will soon be available in the company’s Leap real-time quantum cloud service. Developed with a new lower-noise, multilayer superconducting integrated-circuit fabrication stack, the new Advantage2 prototype demonstrates significant performance gains on hard optimization problems and is expected to be particularly powerful for new use cases such as machine learning.

Rigetti Computing, Inc., a pioneer in full-stack quantum-classical computing, announced today that its 84-qubit Ankaa-2 quantum system was made publicly available to all of its customers via Rigetti’s Quantum Cloud Services (QCS) on December 20, 2023.