Made in North Rhine-Westphalia and Siegen: Green Light for a New Quantum Computer A New Generation of Quantum Computers It is a new generation of quantum computers that was developed in North Rhine-Westphalia and will deliver immense computing power here. JION stands for “Jülich trapped-ION quantum computer” and is an ion-trap quantum computer. It uses electrically charged atoms (ions) as computational units (qubits) and keeps them in a suspended state using electromagnetic fields. This makes them particularly stable and results in low error rates compared to many other quantum computer systems. Quantum computers are expected to enable, for example, more precise calculations—both for the development of new drugs or materials (such as in battery research) and for more secure encryption methods for communication—than is possible with classical computer systems. Minister President Hendrik Wüst and Minister of Science Ina Brandes attended the grand opening at the Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC) of Forschungszentrum Jülich on Thursday, September 3, 2026. As a symbolic part of the ceremony, a computational operation on JION was demonstrated publicly for the first time. With its official commissioning, JION will be integrated into the “Jülich User Infrastructure for Quantum Computing” (JUNIQ) and thus become part of Forschungszentrum Jülich’s modular supercomputer architecture. Users from research and industry can access hybrid computations using Jülich’s supercomputers and specifically offload certain computational operations to quantum systems. This combination of quantum and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure is unique in Germany in terms of its scope and diversity. JION emerged from the “Development Partnership for Ion Trap Quantum Computers in North Rhine-Westphalia” (EPIQ) between Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Siegen-based startup eleQtron. eleQtron was founded in 2020 as a spin-off from the University of Siegen. One of the founders of Germany’s first quantum computing startup is Prof. Dr. Christof Wunderlich, who conducts research in quantum