Co-Designing Quantum Accelerators with Dr. Jan Goetz, CEO of IQM — Maëva Ghonda Exclusive Interview

4 min readJan 17, 2022

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The Quantum AI Series features exclusive interviews of the global innovators shaping the future of quantum computing. In Episode 5 of Season 2, Maëva Ghonda, the founder and chair of the Quantum AI Institute, interviews Dr. Jan Goetz, CEO of IQM.

Watch the LIVE video recording here: YouTube

Maëva: Welcome! Thank you for joining the Executive Talks of our Quantum AI Series. We feature the global innovators shaping the future of quantum computing. Today, we meet: Dr. Jan Goetz. Dr. Goetz is a quantum physicist and the CEO of IQM.

IQM is a company based in Finland that is building next-generation quantum computers. IQM has assembled an exceptional team of international quantum computing experts developing on-premise systems for high-performance computing applications. The company has raised more than EUR 71 million in funding, including the largest seed investment round in Finnish history. Dr. Goetz has a doctorate on superconducting quantum circuits at the Technical University of Munich. He has also worked as a Marie-Curie Fellow in Helsinki at Aalto University, where he holds the title of Lecturer. He is on the Board of the European Innovation Council, the European Quantum Industry Consortium and he is also a member of the German Federal Economic Senate.

Maëva: Dr. Goetz, Welcome.

Jan: Thanks for having me.

Maëva: Thank you again for accepting my invitation! It’s always great to see you. Your kind courtesies are always greatly appreciated. Before we get started, I noticed that you have adopted an HPC strategy. What is your unique value proposition?

Jan: In a nutshell, we build quantum computers. We are a hardware company. And, we cover the whole value chain on the hardware side.

We mainly act as a systems integrator. What we do ourselves is build quantum processors. We design them. And, we have very good design tools for the chipsets. We fabricate them. We have access to a state-owned foundry in Finland. We have also set up our own foundry in Finland where we fabricate superconducting chips. Then, we act as a systems integrator. We bring all of this together with control electronics and the lower level software stacks that are needed to control quantum computers.

And, as you said correctly, our strategy is to place our systems in supercomputing centers because we believe that quantum computing is part of the larger supercomputing framework. And, in this sense — in our view — quantum computers belong in supercomputing centers. So, from a commercialization point of view, our strategy is to sell them — the complete systems — into supercomputing centers. And, they are running them in parallel to their classical CPU clusters but also GPU or any other kind of computing architectures they may have.

Maëva: What is the partnership that you have established with Atos?

Jan: So, if you look at the supercomputing scene, there are a few providers out there who equip supercomputing centers with a classical infrastructure. And, Atos is one of them and we are partnering closely with them. What we are doing with them is we developed together common interfaces so that the quantum computers can actually be nicely integrated into the supercomputing infrastructure. So, Atos is building classical computers and the classical HPC, the supercomputing part. And, we are building the quantum part. And, of course, then there needs to be an interface somewhere. This is what we are working on together. And, we foresee that, by doing this, we can really build a scalable solution which allows us to bring our quantum computers into many supercomputing centers around the world.