Nvidia and Jülich simulate a 50-qubit quantum computer on classical hardware

Nvidia and researchers at Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Centre have fully simulated a 50-qubit universal quantum computer on classical hardware. The partners describe it as the first achievement of its kind. The run took place on JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. The previous high-water mark was a 48-qubit simulation, set in 2019 by Jülich researchers using Japan’s K computer. Two qubits, one very large leap The milestone was announced in a press release dated November 11, 2025. Every qubit added to a simulation doubles the amount of information the classical machine has to track, so small gains in qubit count demand outsized jumps in memory and compute. For this run, that meant handling a state vector of more than 2 quadrillion complex amplitudes. JUPITER is built on Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, which pair a CPU and a GPU with hybrid memory access, allowing processors to share a larger pool of memory than a GPU could reach on its own. The nodes are tied together with Nvidia’s Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking. The software did a lot of the heavy lifting The Jülich Universal Quantum Computer Simulator, now upgraded to a version called JUQCS-50, received se...