Germany has switched on a quantum computer that controls its qubits with microwaves rather than lasers — a hardware distinction that, for the first time, allowed engineers to wire a gate-based trapped-ion system directly into one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers without the vibration-sensitive optical infrastructure that has historically kept such machines confined to specialty physics labs. On September 3, 2026, Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Siegen-based startup eleQtron officially inaugurated JION at JSC — the Jülich trapped-ION quantum computer — at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW).
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