NVIDIA Simulates Record 104-Qubit Fault-Tolerant Protocol on JUPITER

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NVIDIA announced on October 19, 2026, what it described as a record-breaking quantum computing simulation on JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer: a 104-qubit run executed on 8,192 NVIDIA GH200 GPUs at Jülich Supercomputing Centre that models how a realistic quantum processor performs fault-tolerant computation.

NVIDIA describes the 104-qubit simulation as the largest comprehensive simulation of a fault-tolerant quantum processor to date, saying no prior simulations have modeled quantum processors in such full detail. According to the company, the run validates magic-state cultivation, an approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing that requires 90% fewer physical qubits than previous methods. NVIDIA said simulations at this fidelity give researchers the data needed to predict the performance of future designs before they are built, reducing reliance on hardware trial and error, and pointed to expected applications in drug discovery, financial modeling and materials science.

“Useful quantum computing will require fantastically complex, fault-tolerant systems — and understanding how they behave at scale is essential to building them,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said in the company’s announcement. Huang said the Jülich results show that quantum processors and GPU supercomputers can work together on research that would otherwise be out of reach.

Kristel Michielsen, director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich, said Europe’s investment in JUPITER gives researchers the ability to investigate questions that were previously beyond reach, and that the collaboration with NVIDIA brings that capability to quantum computing. She said the work helps scientists make better-informed decisions about the designs most likely to deliver useful applications.

Qubits operate at the limits of physics, and the interactions needed to control them introduce unavoidable, error-inducing noise, NVIDIA’s announcement explains. Computing in the presence of that noise, known as fault-tolerant quantum computing, requires magic states, a specific arrangement of qubits that is continually consumed during a fault-tolerant computation.