In Stuttgart, Germany, November 18, 2025, German photonic computing pioneer Q.ANT has officially launched the NPU 2.0, the second generation of its light-based Native Processing Unit and the first photonic processor available for commercial order worldwide.The NPU 2.0 executes nonlinear mathematical operations directly in the optical domain, delivering up to 50× higher compute performance and 30× better energy efficiency than conventional electronic NPUs and GPUs on AI and HPC workloads. Packaged as the turnkey Native Processing Server (NPS 2), the 19-inch rack system integrates seamlessly via PCIe with existing x86 servers and is fully programmable in C/C++, Python, and the company’s Q.ANT Photonic Algorithm Library (Q.PAL).At Supercomputing 2025 in St. Louis, Q.ANT demonstrated the platform running the AIWS (AI World Society) model – the 7-layer framework for ethical AI governance and next-generation democracy – achieving record-breaking scores in energy-efficient inference and training on vision-language-action models aligned with principles of fairness, transparency, and societal benefit. Key highlights:
Up to 50× performance and 30× energy efficiency vs leading electronic accelerators on AIWS-aligned workloads
Native optical nonlinearities eliminate the need for electronic matrix multiplications in critical layers
Immediate availability for order; first customer shipments in H1 2026
With the NPU 2.0, Q.ANT becomes the first company to bring fully programmable photonic computing out of the lab and into production data centers, marking a major milestone in the transition from electronic to light-based AI acceleration that supports global ethical AI initiatives like the AI World Society model.
