ORCA Computing Deploys PT-3 Photonic Quantum Computer at Digital Realty’s UK London Data Center Lab

ORCA Computing's latest photonic quantum machine, the PT-3, is now running in the Digital Realty Innovation Lab (DRIL) in London, where it operates alongside NVIDIA-accelerated computing to deliver results in AI for science and industrial optimisation.

The London-based company describes the PT-3 as the first quantum computer built to deliver commercial quantum advantage and frames the launch as a critical step towards hybrid quantum supercomputing. Enterprise users are already trialling use cases across life sciences, defence, energy, and logistics.

Protein design gains from a hybrid model

A centrepiece of the launch is a hybrid quantum-classical extension of NVIDIA Proteína, the generative model for protein design, which ORCA calls the world's largest hybrid quantum-classical generative AI model for science. The model was trained on 32 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs working with a PT-3 using 64 photons in 128 qumodes.

Compared with the classical baseline, the hybrid model showed enhanced designability, improving the ratio of useful proteins by 20%, and generated novel proteins with a different mix of secondary structures.

The work builds on earlier life sciences results from ORCA's previous-generation PT-2 system. In collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark, the PT-2 produced around twice as many strong peptide binders as classical AI, validated in the wet lab, and generated 49% more valid, unique molecules on the QM9 benchmark.

Energy scheduling benchmarks show gains

The PT-3 is also being applied to industrial optimisation, including smarter energy scheduling. Earlier this year, JIJ Inc. and ORCA, working with bp and the UK's National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), published a white paper benchmarking hybrid approaches to the unit commitment problem.

On a 25,755-variable unit commitment benchmark, the PT-3 now runs the hybrid quantum-classical workflow in about an hour, more than 12 times faster than its predecessor at the same solution quality.

In the white paper's testing, the hybrid solver's results were competitive with the industry-standard commercial optimisation solver on solution quality and, given more runtime, found the best solutions of any method tested.

Hardware built for commercial rollout

ORCA has designed the PT-3 for deployment rather than laboratory operation. The machine is modular and upgradeable in the field, so performance grows with every upgrade, and customers who start today keep building on the same system. It runs at room temperature, draws 6 kW of power across two standard racks, and becomes operational within hours of installation.

Richard Murray, Co-founder and CEO of ORCA Computing, said the integration of the company's photonic quantum computer with NVIDIA accelerated computing represents "a critical first step in the future of hybrid quantum supercomputing."

He noted that the PT-3 is already delivering results in AI for science and industrial optimisation, from protein design to energy scheduling, and that through Digital Realty, enterprise users can now put it to work on their most challenging workloads.

Partners weigh in on the platform

Sam Stanwyck, Director of Quantum Product at NVIDIA, said the PT-3 brings photonic quantum computing and NVIDIA-accelerated computing together in a system researchers can use to develop and test new applications.

"The value of a computing platform is in what researchers build on it," he said, describing ORCA's extension of the Proteína model to generate a different range of protein structures with improved designability as "a great example of what can be accomplished when these tools come together."

Séamus Dunne, Managing Director, UK & Ireland, at Digital Realty, said the partnership with ORCA reflects a shared ambition to make quantum computing practical for business.

Hosting the PT-3 in the DRIL provides a real-world environment to explore how quantum can deliver value today, and he called it "a significant step towards commercial quantum advantage at scale."

AI for science and the data bottleneck

ORCA positions the PT-3 within the rapidly emerging category of AI for science, which harnesses AI to transform scientific discovery and has become a major industry-wide focus but is held back by limited training data.

According to the company, the 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.

ORCA Computing describes itself as building quantum computing technology to solve real-world problems in life sciences, energy, manufacturing, and beyond.

The company's chairman is Prof. Ian Walmsley, Provost of Imperial College, London, and a leading figure in quantum optics, quantum memories, and waveguide circuits. Murray and the ORCA team will be available for interviews at NVIDIA GTC Berlin, taking place 20–22 October 2026, at booth 7083 in the Inception showcase.