IONOS and Germany’s Q.ANT have launched a free pilot program that will let a small group of developers run artificial intelligence (AI) workloads on a real photonic processor—Q.ANT’s second-generation native processing unit (NPU)—hosted in an IONOS data center in Germany. The announcement, dated November 9, 2026, in Karlsruhe and Stuttgart, opens the call for specific projects that pass a prior selection.
Key takeaways from the IONOS and Q.ANT photonic pilot in 30 seconds
- Selected developers will get to use Q.ANT’s second-generation photonic NPU.
- The hardware sits in an IONOS data center in Germany, under German jurisdiction.
- The pilot starts in November 2026 and is free.
- Spots are limited and require a concrete use case plus the ability to administer a bare-metal server.
- Both companies announced their partnership in May 2026.
Photonic computing uses light instead of electrons to perform part of the calculations. Q.ANT says its processor solves non-linear mathematical functions directly in the optical domain, instead of breaking them down into long sequences of digital steps the way conventional CMOS chips do. According to the press release, this would make it possible to get comparable or better results with fewer parameters, operations, and resources. That’s a claim from the companies themselves, and it’s exactly what the pilot is meant to help test with real workloads.
Who can take part and what’s on offer
Access isn’t open to everyone. Interested parties must submit a specific use case through the IONOS website, and only approved projects will get a spot. The companies also require enough technical knowledge to independently administer a bare-metal server, and warn that the number of participants will be small.
The program accepts a wide range of AI and computing workloads, though Q.ANT highlights two operations where its architecture should perform best: matrix multiplication and non-linear functions. As evaluation areas, it suggests industrial image processing, time-series prediction, scientific simulation, and robotics.
Participants will receive technical onboarding, support throughout the project, and a review of their workloads by Q.ANT, plus a closing workshop to go over results. IONOS provides the bare-metal infrastructure and its support. The pilot follows Q.ANT’s release in September 2026 of an open-source software development kit (SDK), which until now was the only way to simulate the processor’s behavior.
European sovereignty as a selling point
IONOS is leaning hard on the sovereignty angle. The hardware sits in its own data center in Germany, with ISO 27001 certification and European data residency for workloads run there. Achim Weiss, CEO of IONOS, argues in the release that promising computing technologies born in Europe need sovereign European infrastructure to make the jump to enterprise use—a position IONOS has pushed before, as European providers increasingly warn about the risk of buying digital sovereignty with an American label.
Michael Förtsch, founder and CEO of Q.ANT, frames the pilot as a necessary step for the technology to gain real commercial traction: “a new computing architecture only becomes commercially relevant once customers can actually try it,” he says.
The second-generation NPU has already been tested outside the company itself. The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) received processors of this generation in March 2026, and Q.ANT also has systems running at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). Neither the companies nor those centers have published comparative results against GPUs in the announcement, so the pilot remains an evaluation phase rather than a commercial service.
There are also no dates yet for a possible paid offering, nor details on how many NPUs have been installed at the IONOS data center or for how long each participant will be able to use them.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to join the pilot?
Nothing. The program is free for selected projects.
What are the requirements?
Submitting a specific use case through the IONOS website and having the skills to administer a bare-metal server. Spots are limited.
Where is the photonic processor located?
In an IONOS data center in Germany, subject to German jurisdiction and ISO 27001 certified.
What workloads is it designed for?
Q.ANT highlights matrix multiplication and non-linear functions, with applications in industrial vision, time series, scientific simulation, and robotics.
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This article is also available in Spanish: «IONOS y Q.ANT abren un piloto gratuito para probar computación fotónica», on Revista Cloud.
