Quantinuum (NASDAQ: QNT), Rolls-Royce, Riverlane and EPCC — the UK National Supercomputing Centre at the University of Edinburgh — announced a multi-year agreement on July 14, 2026 to develop fault-tolerant quantum computing workflows for complex fluid dynamics simulations, starting with gas turbine design.
Helios Becomes The Testbed
Under the deal, Quantinuum will provide access to its Helios trapped-ion quantum computer and software environment; Rolls-Royce brings industrial use cases and domain expertise; Riverlane contributes quantum error correction and fault-tolerant algorithm design; and EPCC layers on high-performance computing and hybrid workflow integration. Partners will run key computational building blocks of industrially relevant quantum algorithms on Helios and assess scaling on Quantinuum's planned Sol and Apollo systems.
Fluid Dynamics Is A Real Turbine Bottleneck
"The computing demands of simulating complex fluid dynamics are a major challenge in industrial design," said Quantinuum President and CEO Dr. Rajeeb Hazra. Rolls-Royce Computational Science Fellow Leigh Lapworth said the group has spent nearly five years co-developing hybrid fault-tolerant algorithms with Riverlane and EPCC on classical emulators — the deal marks the first step to running them on real quantum hardware. Riverlane CEO Steve Brierley called QEC "the critical technology that will ultimately unlock large fault-tolerant quantum computing."
UK Bets Bigger On teraQuOp
The agreement is a marker for the UK's teraQuOp mission — the national goal of standing up UK-based quantum computers capable of one trillion error-free operations. It also lands during a hot week for enterprise quantum announcements, alongside Pasqal's Korea MoU with MegazoneCloud, Diraq's imec 300mm silicon spin qubit scale-up, and Google's Willow self-correcting chip milestone.
Reporting based on coverage from Quantinuum, PRNewswire, StockTitan and HPCwire.