QCBRIEF
Helios, a third generation trapped ion quantum computer, will sit inside a U.S. Oracle Cloud data center alongside GPUs and HPC, with a managed preview in the coming months.
On August 11, 2026, Oracle and Quantinuum announced a multi-year deal to host Helios, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer, inside a U.S. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) AI data center as a managed service, with a preview opening to OCI customers in the coming months.
Helios, an ion-based machine different in hardware family from the superconducting systems more often in the news, launched in November 2025. Sandia National Laboratories has independently validated its performance under a renewed CRADA, with results published in a Nature paper: 48 logical qubits, 99.921% two-qubit gate fidelity, 99.9975% single-qubit gate fidelity, 99.967% measurement fidelity.
Helios will sit alongside OCI's HPC, GPU, networking, and storage, with an NVIDIA Grace Hopper system handling real-time decoding of the quantum state. Hybrid quantum-classical workloads, covering drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling, and large-scale optimization, can move data between OCI object storage and a Helios circuit without leaving an OCI account.
The preview timing is soft, the benchmarks are vendor-reported, and no pricing, SLAs, or GA date has been disclosed. The OCI quantum service will combine Quantinuum's stack with support for open-source hybrid-programming frameworks.