ORCA Launches PT-3 Photonic Quantum Computer for AI and Optimization

LONDON, Oct. 15, 2026 — ORCA Computing today launched the PT-3, the newest generation of its photonic quantum computers, and the first built to deliver commercial quantum advantage. The first system is live in the Digital Realty Innovation Lab (DRIL) in London, where it runs alongside NVIDIA accelerated computing.

AI for science, harnessing AI to transform scientific discovery, is rapidly emerging as one of the most important new categories in computing and a major industry-wide focus, yet it is held back by limited training data. According to ORCA, PT-3 works alongside GPUs to increase the expressivity of AI models (their ability to represent complex patterns and data distributions), helping them learn more from limited data and identify better, more novel candidates for new drugs and materials.

The PT-3 has allowed ORCA to generate results from a hybrid quantum-classical extension of NVIDIA Proteína, the generative model for protein design. Trained on 32 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs working with a PT-3 using 64 photons in 128 qumodes, the hybrid model showed enhanced designability over the classical baseline, improving the ratio of useful proteins by 20%, and generated novel proteins with a different mix of secondary structures.