Duquesne Family Office Invests in Q.ANT to Advance Sustainable Photonic AI Infrastructure

Q.ANT, a pioneer in photonic processing for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, announced the second closing of its Series A funding round with an additional investment from Duquesne Family Office LLC, the investment firm of Stanley F. Druckenmiller. This raise brings Q.ANT's total funding to $80 million, representing the largest financing round for photonic computing in Europe. The funds will accelerate commercialization of Q.ANT's light-based processors, drive next-stage technology development to improve AI infrastructure, and support the company's expansion into the U.S. market.

The race to expand global AI infrastructure has made semiconductor chips both a strategic asset and a geopolitical lever. Worldwide spending on AI-related data center infrastructure is projected to exceed $5.2 trillion over the next five years according to a McKinsey forecast cited in The Economist. However, this explosive growth faces a hard limit: energy consumption. As data centers consume increasing shares of national power grids, efficiency has become the defining constraint on progress.

Q.ANT addresses this challenge at its foundation by computing natively with light. Its photonic processors deliver the precision and performance AI and HPC demand with only a fraction of the energy required by electronic chips. The result is scalable, sustainable computing for the next generation of data-intensive systems. Dr. Michael Förtsch, founder and CEO of Q.ANT, stated that AI is pushing the limits of global resources including energy, hardware, and capital, emphasizing that Q.ANT achieves performance through efficiency rather than brute power alone.

In just five years, Q.ANT has brought to market the world's first commercial photonic processor for real-world AI and HPC workloads. Built on Thin-Film Lithium Niobate material, the Q.ANT Native Processing Server integrates seamlessly into today's data centers as a plug-in co-processor. Early benchmarks show up to 30x greater energy efficiency, 50x performance gains, and the potential to increase data center capacity by 100x without active cooling. The company achieves 16-bit floating-point accuracy equivalent to modern digital processors while retaining the continuous advantages of analog computing.

Industry analysis supports the importance of photonic computing for meeting generative AI demands. According to Gartner's Emerging Tech: Emergence Cycle for Generative AI report, conventional computing systems are severely constrained when solving emerging information processing challenges posed by GenAI. The report notes that photonic computing offers several potential benefits over electronic computing, including increased bandwidth, processing power and storage while keeping energy and power consumption under control.

Q.ANT's mission is to redefine AI infrastructure with light-based processors that deliver higher performance using a fraction of the energy required by electronics. By 2030, the company aims to make photonic processing a foundational pillar of global AI systems, radically improving scalability and energy efficiency. The Photonic Native Processing Server is now being evaluated by leading supercomputing data centers and is fully compatible with today's programming languages and AI software frameworks, delivering higher compute density while eliminating on-chip heat and consuming far less energy.