IBM supports award-winning projects in NEDO Challenge

Key takeaways:

• All nine prize-winning teams used IBM quantum computers during their research for the NEDO Quantum Challenge.
• Winning projects spanned all three tracks: Society 5.0, Quality of Life, and Cool Japan.
• Teams explored applications including disaster prevention, drug discovery, gut microbiome analysis, materials research, music generation, and animation.
• IBM supported participants with quantum computing resources, technical guidance, workshops, and access to educational content.

When Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) presented the first-season awards of its NEDO Quantum Challenge on 15 October 2026, winning teams across the competition’s Society 5.0, Quality of Life (QoL) and Cool Japan tracks reported results generated on IBM quantum hardware. In fact, all nine prize-winning teams used IBM quantum computers during their research for the challenge, and six of them relied on IBM quantum computers exclusively.

Each topic track had at least one winner that ran exclusively on IBM quantum computers. Winning projects ranged from disaster prevention, transaction security, and microbiome design to music generation and manga production. Two winning teams that used IBM quantum computers have already launched companies based on their work: Q4Health and EntangleTune.

IBM’s support went beyond quantum computer access. Throughout the challenge, IBM gave participants access to five of the company’s quantum computers with its latest processors, along with education, hands-on programming sessions, personalized Quantum Clinic consultations and technical support. IBM experts also advised Society 5.0 third-place winning team, Setouchi kara Ryoshi no Sekai e, on its algorithm, and joined Cool Japan third-place winning team with Mitsubishi Chemical, Keio University, and Arizona State University as co-researchers.

Quantum computing for real-world problems

NEDO, which operates under Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, launched the prize-based program to explore how next-generation quantum computers could address societal issues and to quickly identify promising early-stage technologies that could give rise to new industries. Teams were asked to tackle problems that are difficult or impossible for today’s computers.

The competition organized those problems into three tracks:

• Society 5.0 projects explored problems related to infrastructure safety, trustworthy transactions and vehicle design as part of Japan’s broader initiative to use advanced technologies to address societal challenges.
• Quality of Life projects focused on health, including drug discovery, multidrug-resistant infections and the gut microbiome.
• Cool Japan projects applied quantum computing to areas ranging from music and anime production to low-carbon chemical manufacturing.

Each track offered prizes of ¥40 million (about $270,000) for first place, ¥20 million (about $130,000) for second and ¥10 million (about $67,000) for third. Season 1, which began research and development in fiscal year 2025, drew 87 applications. Judges awarded nine prizes: the QoL track awarded first, second and third place, while Society 5.0 and Cool Japan each awarded one second-place and two third-place prizes, with no first prize, due to the high benchmarks required in each track.

IBM was among a few organizations that provided computing environments to participants free of charge, and IBM Quantum became the most widely selected platform: 65 of the 80 participating teams, about 81%, chose IBM. Those teams ran 11,159 jobs and used more than 5,900 minutes of quantum compute time, about 105% of the allocated time, with activity surging in the final month before the June 30 submission deadline.

Society 5.0: safer infrastructure, trusted transactions and lighter cars

In the Society 5.0 track, NV Learning Center won second place with a project to improve infrastructure safety and disaster prevention. The team applied quantum Krylov learning and quantum state transfer, running its final results entirely on IBM quantum computers.

Q-Chainners, a team from KDDI Research, took third place by combining a quantum hash function with classical processing to make transactions more trustworthy. The team ran its final results on four different IBM quantum computers. Setouchi kara Ryoshi no Sekai e also placed third with a car-body design project aimed at making vehicles lighter. The team combined quantum annealing with the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA), using systems from several providers, including IBM. Experts from IBM also advised the team on its QAOA approach.

Cool Japan: music, materials and animation

In the Cool Japan track, EntangleTune won second place for timbre and music generation that draws on the structure of quantum entanglement. The team ran its final results only on IBM quantum computers and has since established their EntangleTune project as a stand-alone business.

IBM took part directly in one of the track’s two third-place teams. Researchers from Mitsubishi Chemical, Keio University, Arizona State University and IBM developed a hybrid quantum-classical optimization approach for low-carbon process design in the chemical materials industry, with IBM serving as a co-researcher. The team ran its final results on the IBM Quantum System One at the University of Tokyo.

The other third-place team, Qrazy Qreators, applied quantum flow matching to manga and anime production. Running only on IBM quantum computers, its end-to-end pipeline uses shallow circuits and generates a frame in about 30 seconds. The team has also applied the method to quantum chemistry, and a paper is in preparation.

Quality of Life: drug discovery and the microbiome

In the QoL track, first place went to Shionogi & Co. for a quantum-HPC hybrid approach to drug discovery based on Deep QSCI, a divide-and-conquer form of quantum-selected configuration interaction from the same family of methods as IBM’s sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD). Shionogi tested its approach on IBM quantum computers during the challenge, though its final results were produced by simulation.

Mori-san Daisuki Club placed second with a project to design combinations of gut bacteria, pairing Lotka–Volterra stability analysis with a quantum search algorithm. Running only on IBM quantum computers, the team combined error mitigation with post-processing through a Qiskit Function from Australia-based startup Q-CTRL, available in IBM’s Qiskit Functions Catalog. The team also quantified the conditions under which quantum advantage could emerge.

Q4Health took third place by searching for combinations of bacteria to fight multidrug-resistant infections. The team encoded the problem with diagonal Pauli operators and compared quantum and classical methods to identify where quantum advantage may appear. It used IBM as well as another vendor’s quantum computers, along with Kipu Quantum’s Iskay Qiskit Function from IBM’s Qiskit Functions Catalog, and has since founded a company based on its results.