LUMI Supercomputer to Get €33M Quantum Upgrade from IQM — Days After Firm's Wall Street Debut
IQM Quantum Computers has been selected to build a quantum computer for Finland’s LUMI AI Factory, in an order that exceeds the company’s entire 2025 revenue and follows its debut as the first European quantum firm listed on a major US exchange.
Text by Martti Asikainen, 9.7.2026 | Photo by LUMI AI Factory
Finnish quantum computing company IQM Quantum Computers has won a competitive tender to supply a quantum computer to CSC – IT Center for Science, the operator of Finland’s LUMI supercomputer.
The project, named LUMI-IQ, has a total budget of €40M, of which €33M is IQM’s share of the contract, Yle reported. That figure exceeds IQM’s total 2025 revenue of around €31M, making it the second-largest order in the company’s history.
The award comes roughly a week after IQM became the first European quantum computing company to list on a major US stock exchange, trading on Nasdaq under the ticker IQMX following a merger with special purpose acquisition company Real Asset Acquisition Corp.
What is being build
The system will use IQM’s Halocene H4 architecture, launching with a 150-qubit processor — qubits being the basic units of quantum information — before a series of planned upgrades increases both qubit count and error resilience. Installation is scheduled to begin in summer 2027, with operations starting later that year.
LUMI-IQ will be based at CSC’s data centre in Kajaani, northern Finland, alongside the existing LUMI and Roihu supercomputers. It will be joined by a second new machine, called LUMI AI, whose supplier has not yet been announced. According to Yle, both new systems are expected to cost approximately €390M each, as part of a wider AI factory project with a total cost exceeding €612M.
The EU is funding half of that total, with Finland contributing up to €250M. The remaining consortium members are the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Norway and Poland.
Untested promise
CSC’s Director of Science and Technology, Pekka Manninen, said the new system would be used to search for applications where quantum computing outperforms conventional supercomputing — but he was direct about the current state of the technology.
“A true quantum benefit, i.e., a use case where quantum computing would be more efficient than a normal supercomputer, has not yet been fully demonstrated,” Manninen told Yle.
That assessment sits somewhat apart from the more promotional tone of IQM and LUMI’s own announcements, which described the deployment as a “milestone” for European quantum computing without specifying what problem the system is expected to solve first.
Economic case
CSC’s managing director, Kimmo Koski, framed the investment in broader economic terms, telling Yle that every euro spent on high-performance computing over the past five years had generated a twentyfold return in value for companies and researchers — a track record that underpins the case for continued investment in Finland’s computing infrastructure, including LUMI-IQ.
IQM’s chief executive and co-founder, Jan Goetz, said in the joint LUMI-IQM announcement that CSC and the LUMI AI Factory were “exactly the kind of partners that define what production quantum computing looks like in practice.” IQM said it has sold 23 quantum systems globally to date — more, the company says, than any competitor.
The size of the order relative to IQM’s finances underlines the scale of the deal: a single contract worth more than the company’s entire 2025 turnover arrives within days of its Nasdaq debut, at a time when its share price has shown some early volatility, having opened at $14.30 before falling to $12.89, according to DataCenterDynamics.
With LUMI-IQ, CSC and IQM are positioning Finland at the front of the search for practical quantum advantage — a goal the wider field is still working toward, but one that projects like this are designed to help answer.
