RIKEN brought its ROQUO supercomputer online at its Kobe facility, connecting 540 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to both Quantinuum's Reimei trapped-ion quantum computer and IBM's Quantum System Two, alongside Japan's Fugaku supercomputer. The system hit 19.8 petaflops on a classical benchmark; RIKEN says quantum-enabled scientific results at scale haven't been shown yet, this launch confirms the classical GPU infrastructure works.

This is the U.S.-Japan Genesis Mission partnership's most concrete infrastructure milestone so far, both Quantinuum and IBM hardware are now physically wired into a national-lab-grade classical supercomputer, which is the actual prerequisite for any real quantum-HPC hybrid workload.

Read the distinction carefully: this proves the classical GPU side works, not that hybrid quantum-classical computing does anything useful yet. External access is via a test-user program only, don't read this as commercial availability for either Quantinuum or IBM.

RIKEN Center for Computational Science. (2026, June 19). New supercomputer "ROQUO" for the Quantum-HPC Hybrid Platform enters operation — Launching full-scale integration of quantum computing and HPC [Press release]. https://www.r-ccs.riken.jp/en/outreach/topics/20260619-2/index.html