IONOS and Q.ANT Launch Photonic Computing Pilot

Karlsruhe / Stuttgart, Germany, 9 November 2026.

IONOS, the leading digitalisation partner and trusted cloud enabler for small and medium-sized businesses, and Q.ANT, a pioneer in commercial photonic computing, today announced the launch of a joint pilot programme to bring photonic computing to commercial server environments for the first time.

The pilot programme gives software developers the opportunity to test and evaluate their AI models on real photonic processors running in a bare metal infrastructure on dedicated hardware. This opens up a new way of computing: developers can build leaner AI models to run faster by making direct use of complex nonlinear mathematical functions. These efficiency gains come at a decisive moment. As AI workloads keep growing, the cost of running them is becoming a real limit on how far AI can scale. For data centre operators, photonic computing promises lower energy consumption and operating costs.

The launch represents the first step towards commercial adoption of photonic computing, extending access beyond specialised research institutions. Following the launch of Q.ANT’s open-source software development kit (SDK) in September, developers who could previously build and simulate applications can now run their workloads on physical photonic processors through IONOS’s bare metal infrastructure. By making its hardware accessible through IONOS, a leading commercial server hosting provider, Q.ANT paves the way for a new developer ecosystem and a new generation of AI applications.

“Promising computing technologies from Europe need sovereign European infrastructure to make the leap into business use,” said Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOS. “In the pilot programme, Q.ANT’s photonic processor runs in an IONOS data centre under German jurisdiction. Users can explore processing with light on their own workloads. The results will show which applications benefit most and will feed directly into our future development work.”

“A new computing architecture only becomes commercially relevant when customers can test it against the workloads that matter to them. When we launched our SDK, developers could begin building applications for photonic computing. Now, with IONOS, they can take their work and run those applications on the real processor,” said Dr Michael Förtsch, Founder and CEO of Q.ANT. “This matters because the conversations around AI are shifting from what the models can do to what it costs to run them. Photonic computing can make the next generation of AI models leaner: complex functions that inflate digital models can be computed with light using less data and fewer parameters, resulting in lower energy requirements for the same workloads.”

Through the IONOS website, applicants with approved projects will gain access to Q.ANT’s second-generation Native Processing Unit (NPU) via a bare metal server in a German IONOS data centre, where they can run and evaluate their own workloads with their own data and software. Developers can also explore new algorithms and AI architectures that use the NPU’s ability to compute complex nonlinear functions natively in light, rather than breaking them down into long sequences of digital steps as CMOS-based chips must. This can deliver comparable or better results with fewer parameters, fewer operations, and fewer resources. At the same time, the programme will identify where photonic processing offers the greatest advantages, providing the real-world validation needed for broader commercial deployment.

The pilot marks the next step in the collaboration IONOS and Q.ANT announced in May 2026 and the launch of Q.ANT’s open-source software development kit (SDK) for photonic computing.

Next step in IONOS’s AI Strategy

The pilot programme is part of IONOS’s AI strategy. Businesses already use AI assistants from the IONOS Momentum Suite for tasks such as answering phone calls, customer service, appointment scheduling or web- and app building, and developers use the IONOS AI Model Hub to access open-source AI models hosted in Germany. At the infrastructure level, IONOS offers GPU servers for training and running AI models in its European data centres. The pilot adds photonic processors into IONOS data centres and tests which AI workloads can run with lower energy consumption.

From HPC Testing to Commercial Workloads

Q.ANT’s photonic processor has already been evaluated in operational high-performance computing environments. In March 2026, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) received Q.ANT’s second-generation processors for testing across HPC and artificial intelligence workloads. The research centre subsequently evaluated the hardware on its performance, execution time, energy consumption, error rates and other metrics. Q.ANT systems are also operating at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).

Building for Photonic Computing

The pilot programme begins in November 2026 and will be available free of charge to a limited number of selected participants. Applicants must submit a concrete use case through the IONOS website and have the technical expertise required to independently administer a bare metal server.

The programme is open to a broad range of AI and computational workloads. Operations such as matrix multiplication and nonlinear mathematical functions are particularly well suited to Q.ANT’s architecture. Potential areas for evaluation include industrial image processing, time-series prediction, scientific simulation and robotics.

Participants will receive direct support from IONOS and Q.ANT throughout the programme. Each engagement will include technical onboarding, project support and workload review by Q.ANT, followed by a final workshop to evaluate results and performance metrics, while IONOS supports participants on the underlying bare metal infrastructure. Feedback from participants will help shape further development of Q.ANT’s processor and software stack.

The pilot systems will be hosted in Germany within IONOS infrastructure. IONOS data centres are ISO 27001 certified and provide European data residency for workloads hosted in Germany.

Applications for the pilot programme are available here.