IBM and Lockheed establish Swiss quantum hub

IBM and Lockheed Martin have established a quantum innovation hub at ETH Zurich through an offset agreement with Switzerland’s Federal Office for Defence Procurement, armasuisse, linking new computing infrastructure with defence-relevant research in sensing and advanced manufacturing.

The programme will bring Switzerland its first IBM Quantum System Two, hosted at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano. IBM will operate the machine, while ETH Zurich will provide access, research expertise, and links across Swiss academia, industry, and technology organisations.

Deployment is expected by the end of 2026. Organisations participating through the hub can meanwhile use IBM’s existing cloud-access quantum systems, allowing research projects and workforce development to begin before the dedicated Swiss hardware enters service.

The defence connection extends beyond the offset arrangement used to establish the programme. IBM and Lockheed Martin have identified two areas for planned joint development: quantum sensing applications for navigation and work intended to improve additive manufacturing of metallic alloys.

Research targets practical engineering constraints

Neither workstream represents a fielded military capability. The programme instead creates infrastructure for determining whether quantum methods can improve specific engineering problems sufficiently to justify their complexity alongside established classical computing, sensing, and manufacturing techniques.

Navigation offers one possible route. Military platforms increasingly need positioning systems capable of operating when satellite-navigation signals are unavailable, degraded, or deliberately disrupted, creating demand for technologies that can complement conventional inertial navigation and other independent reference methods.

Quantum sensing can exploit physical effects with extremely high sensitivity, but translating laboratory performance into military hardware imposes a separate engineering burden. Size, weight, power demand, calibration, environmental stability, vibration tolerance, processing requirements, and integration with existing navigation systems will determine whether a technique that works under controlled conditions can be deployed aboard an aircraft, vehicle, ship, or other operational platform.

Lockheed Martin’s involvement brings those constraints closer to the research programme. The company works across aerospace platforms, sensors, advanced manufacturing, and mission systems, providing potential routes for comparing emerging quantum techniques against the performance, packaging, reliability, and qualification standards already demanded by defence programmes.

The additive-manufacturing work addresses a different part of the industrial chain. Metallic additive manufacturing is already used across aerospace and defence development, but acceptance of a component still depends on conventional physical properties including porosity, fatigue life, residual stress, dimensional control, surface condition, material chemistry, and repeatability between production batches.

Quantum computing could contribute to modelling, materials optimisation, or other computationally demanding stages, but it does not remove those manufacturing requirements. Any resulting process still has to produce parts that can be inspected, qualified, documented, and reproduced consistently enough for their intended application.

The System Two installation will also sit inside a wider high-performance-computing environment rather than operating as an isolated replacement for classical systems. Hybrid workflows allow quantum processing to be applied to selected parts of a problem while established computing infrastructure continues to handle tasks for which conventional methods remain faster, cheaper, or more mature.

That division is particularly relevant to engineering organisations already using finite-element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, optimisation software, machine learning, and established materials-modelling tools. New computing methods will have to fit into those workflows rather than requiring entire engineering organisations to abandon proven processes.

IBM says the Swiss system will use its Nighthawk quantum processor and will be supported by access to its broader quantum software and training environment. The programme also includes education, certification, workshops, and other workforce initiatives intended to expand the number of researchers and engineers able to use the hardware productively.

Skills may prove as significant a constraint as hardware. Defence companies can buy access to computing resources comparatively quickly, but building teams capable of framing engineering problems appropriately, assessing quantum results, and distinguishing genuine advantage from an expensive alternative to conventional computation takes considerably longer.

The Swiss model creates a shared environment in which universities and companies can test those questions against accessible hardware. Its offset basis also turns part of Switzerland’s defence procurement relationship with Lockheed Martin into domestic research infrastructure rather than limiting industrial participation to conventional component manufacture.

Lockheed Martin and IBM have already been collaborating on quantum and artificial-intelligence research, while the ETH Zurich hub broadens that relationship into a national ecosystem involving Swiss institutions. The proposed projects now give the collaboration defined defence-engineering subjects against which progress can be measured.

Those measurements will matter more than processor specifications alone. A useful navigation project would eventually need to show stable sensing performance outside laboratory conditions, while materials research would have to demonstrate a measurable improvement in design, processing, or qualification that survives physical manufacture.

The hardware installation in Lugano therefore marks the start of the programme rather than its result. Switzerland will gain dedicated quantum-computing infrastructure during 2026; whether it produces deployable defence technology will depend on the engineering work that follows.