Following the appointment of Aparna Prabhakar to QuantWare’s Board of Directors, QuantWare CEO Matt Rijlaarsdam sat down with her for a Fireside Conversation on the future of quantum computing.
Aparna, Chief Strategy & Sustainability Officer at Schneider Electric and former Vice President of IBM Quantum Ecosystem, brings deep experience in scaling technology platforms and managing the energy footprint of global compute infrastructure. In this conversation, Aparna shares her perspective on the road to utility-scale quantum computing, the lessons from IBM’s early quantum journey, and why she believes QuantWare’s VIO 3D scaling architecture is key to building the next era of compute.
Below are highlights from that discussion.
Matt: We’re seeing hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into AI infrastructure, which has a huge impact on global energy usage, especially in the US. How do you think quantum computing ties into this, and will its impact on the energy footprint of compute be net positive?
Aparna: Let’s start with some facts: in 2024, in the US alone, 93 new data centres are coming online, and 84 more are under permitting. The ones being built now are six times larger than those built just a year ago. That’s the scale we’re talking about.
At Schneider Electric, we supply infrastructure for these data centres, from cooling systems and uninterrupted power supplies to switchgear. Historically, we were simply suppliers. But now we’re working directly with chip providers to re-architect data centres from the ground up, because you can no longer think about compute modalities in isolation.
When you layer in quantum, alongside accelerated and non-accelerated classical compute, the architecture questions get complex: Will AI and quantum sit in the same data centres? Should they be separate because of latency and environmental requirements? How do we design for those conditions? These are hard questions the industry hasn’t fully answered yet because everyone is still building in silos.
To me, the real issue isn’t if quantum happens — it’s about when it happens. Are we being proactive in planning for that integration, or will we be reactive later? The end user doesn’t care whether a solution runs on AI or quantum; they care about value and efficiency. The compute mix must deliver the best result per watt, per dollar.
What the GenAI wave showed us is that breakthroughs arrive faster than we expect and most of us are rarely ready. We tend to respond reactively instead of designing systems with scalability and sustainability in mind. As a quantum community, we should be preparing now: understanding our energy envelopes, planning for hybrid architectures, and ensuring the systems we build today will scale efficiently tomorrow.
Matthijs: You’ve now seen QuantWare up close. From your perspective, what are the core problems the quantum industry still needs to tackle and how do you see QuantWare fitting in as systems scale toward the 10,000- and million-qubit era?
Aparna: One thing I appreciate about QuantWare is how clearly the company focuses on the real problems of scaling. Fifteen years ago, the challenge was just to get more than two qubits on a chip. That’s no longer the frontier. Today, even if you can build a large number of qubits, the real bottlenecks are in packaging, interconnects, and system integration — how you scale those architectures into useful, stable, and manufacturable systems.
That’s why I find QuantWare’s VIO 3D scaling architecture so compelling. It addresses those bottlenecks head-on by making scalable packaging and power-efficient interconnects possible. It’s not abstract; it’s tangible. When you look at it, you can understand the problem statement and see how the design directly responds to it.
For quantum to become truly useful, these issues must be solved early and holistically. QuantWare’s approach gives me confidence because it’s both technically rigorous and pragmatic; it bridges research-grade innovation with real-world manufacturability.
Matthijs: And looking specifically at VIO, how do you think we can position it to make the greatest impact in the quantum industry?
Aparna: If you’d asked me three years ago, I would have said full stack is the way to go: own everything, top to bottom. That was certainly the philosophy I lived and breathed at IBM Quantum.
But I also spent those years building ecosystems, and one thing I learned is that you don't know what you don't know. And it does help when a community comes together and you're solving different types of problems in different ways, because you need to look at a problem and approach it differently. And when you're tackling different stacks in the technology separately, but towards a common goal, I think you can accelerate much faster. And I like that idea.
That’s why I like that QuantWare is not trying to own the entire stack because that actually means you can bring the best into play. You can actually be a little bit more pragmatic and say, how do I actually accelerate the science behind this? And how do I accelerate the technology behind it much faster? But when you try to own the entire stack, sometimes you forget that you're actually doing it for the industry. You're trying to establish a much bigger play here at QuantWare. So I think you'll get to a much bigger value.
The Fireside Talk between Aparna Prabhakar and Matt Rijlaarsdam explores the convergence of scaling, sustainability, and ecosystem building that will define quantum’s future.
