Quandela Cuts Photonic Quantum Latency From 5,000 Milliseconds to 30 With Direct NVQLink Integration

[Hitman99]

French photonics company Quandela announced on June 23 that it has successfully integrated its photonic quantum processing units with Nvidia's accelerated high-performance computing infrastructure using NVQLink, reducing latency from traditional cloud-based quantum access architectures of around 5,000 milliseconds to approximately 30 milliseconds. The advancement, presented at ISC High Performance 2026, bypasses conventional cloud APIs and asynchronous job queues entirely, establishing a direct, low-latency connection that allows the quantum processor to function as a tightly coupled hardware accelerator sitting alongside GPU clusters rather than as a remote service accessed over the internet.

The practical significance of the roughly 160-fold latency reduction is that it enables genuinely real-time hybrid quantum-classical computing for the first time at this scale. Quantum machine learning applications in particular depend on rapid, repeated interaction between classical and quantum processing stages, with classical neural network layers feeding data to quantum circuits and quantum measurement results feeding back into classical optimisation loops many times per second. At cloud-API latencies of several seconds per round trip, this kind of tight iteration was simply impractical for most QML workloads. At 30 milliseconds, the quantum processor becomes responsive enough to participate in training loops the way a GPU or other classical accelerator would.

Quandela operates Belenos, its 12-qubit photonic system, which OVHcloud has separately made commercially accessible on European public cloud infrastructure alongside Pasqal's neutral-atom hardware. Photonic quantum computing's defining advantage, room-temperature operation without the dilution refrigeration that superconducting systems require, makes this kind of tight integration into conventional HPC and data centre environments significantly more straightforward than for cryogenic alternatives. The result arrives the same week the Open Compute Project Foundation published formal data centre architecture standards for integrating quantum processing units, providing the broader infrastructure framework that low-latency demonstrations like Quandela's are designed to operate within.

Newsquantumcomputingreport.com