Stuttgart, 9 November 2026. Q.ANT and IONOS announced the launch of a joint pilot program to bring photonic computing to commercial bare metal server environments. The program lets software developers test and evaluate their AI models on real photonic processors running on dedicated hardware in IONOS infrastructure.
Approved applicants gain access to Q.ANT's second-generation Native Processing Unit (NPU) through a bare metal server in a German IONOS data center. Participants can run and evaluate their own workloads with their own data and software. The pilot begins in November 2026 and is 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 to independently administer a bare metal server.
The program follows the launch of Q.ANT's open-source software development kit (SDK) in September. Developers who could previously build and simulate applications only on the SDK can now run their workloads on physical photonic processors. The NPU computes complex nonlinear functions natively in light, rather than breaking them down into long sequences of digital steps as CMOS-based chips must, which the companies say can deliver comparable or better results with fewer parameters, operations and resources.
Operations such as matrix multiplication and nonlinear mathematical functions are named as particularly well suited to the architecture. Potential areas for evaluation include industrial image processing, time-series prediction, scientific simulation and robotics. Participants receive technical onboarding, project support and workload review from Q.ANT, followed by a final workshop to evaluate results and performance metrics, while IONOS supports the bare metal infrastructure. Feedback will help form further development of Q.ANT's processor and software stack.
"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 program, Q.ANT's photonic processor runs in an IONOS data center under German jurisdiction." Dr. Michael Förtsch, Founder and CEO of Q.ANT, said: "A new computing architecture only becomes commercially relevant when customers can test it against the workloads that matter to them."
The pilot marks the next step in the collaboration IONOS and Q.ANT announced in May 2026. 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. Q.ANT systems are also operating at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). The pilot systems are hosted in Germany within IONOS infrastructure, and IONOS data centers are ISO 27001 certified.
Source: Q.ANT news
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