IBM and Lockheed Martin announced Sept. 10 that Switzerland will get its first IBM Quantum System Two, with installation at ETH Zurich's Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano planned by the end of 2026.
The deployment is financed through a Lockheed Martin offset agreement with armasuisse, Switzerland's Federal Office for Defence Procurement.
ETH Zurich will coordinate access for researchers, other Swiss universities, and selected Swiss companies, but it has not published how it will select those companies, what access will cost, or how it will allocate computing capacity.
How the Swiss quantum hub will work
IBM says the dedicated System Two will be powered by its Nighthawk r2 processor and operated by IBM. CSCS will host the system and provide power, cooling, security, and other technical infrastructure, while ETH Zurich coordinates access.
Organizations joining the Swiss Quantum Innovation Hub through ETH Zurich will initially receive cloud access to IBM's global quantum fleet. Once the Lugano system is operational, participants will also be able to use the dedicated Swiss machine.
ETH Zurich says its agreement with IBM covers installation and operation for an initial three-year period through 2029. It identifies potential users as researchers from the ETH Domain, other Swiss universities, and selected Swiss companies.
Nighthawk r2 has 120 programmable qubits and can execute more than 100,000 circuits per second, according to IBM, up to 25 times the circuit throughput of its Heron-family processors. IBM also says the processor has demonstrated accurate computations on circuits containing more than 7,500 gates.
The system will sit near CSCS's Alps supercomputer, allowing researchers to explore quantum-classical workflows. Similar efforts are placing quantum hardware alongside conventional data-center and high-performance computing infrastructure.
What eWeek found: Company access still lacks key details
ETH has identified selected Swiss companies as potential users, but the public terms stop short of explaining how businesses will actually secure time on the machine.
Several details remain unresolved:
- Selection: ETH has not published the criteria it will use to choose participating companies.
- Pricing: Neither IBM nor ETH has disclosed what outside organizations will pay for dedicated-system access.
- Capacity: There are no published guarantees covering how much computing time a company could receive or whether recurring capacity can be reserved.
- Ownership: The announcements do not identify who will own the installed system or disclose the value of the Lockheed Martin offset agreement.
Those gaps make it difficult for companies to plan around the new infrastructure. A startup cannot yet determine whether local quantum computing fits its development budget, while an enterprise cannot calculate whether sufficient capacity will be available for sustained projects rather than occasional experiments.
The infrastructure surrounding the processor is also becoming a larger part of quantum investment. Recent US quantum awards targeted cryogenics, fabrication, optics, and control electronics across competing architectures. IBM is separately expanding the cryogenic infrastructure required for the fault-tolerant Starling system it targets for 2029.
Lockheed Martin and IBM also plan research projects involving quantum sensing for navigation and additive manufacturing of metallic alloys. The hub will provide training through IBM Quantum Network and IBM Quantum Platform resources, including coursework, certifications, workshops, hackathons, and conferences.
Switzerland has secured the hardware, host, operator, and funding mechanism. How ETH selects companies and divides access will determine how broadly that new computing capacity reaches beyond academia.
Also read: IonQ's quantum security blueprint estimates that a future fault-tolerant machine could attack Bitcoin's secp256k1 signatures in about 26 days.