Ireland's first sovereign quantum access & quantum compute. Delivered within twelve months.

The twelve-month commitment

By the second quarter of 2027 — twelve months from now — Ireland will have its own quantum compute capability under Irish ownership, operating from Irish jurisdiction, accessible to Irish researchers, businesses, and government on terms that do not require sending workloads to foreign clouds. That is the project. It is being delivered by an Irish-owned entity, founded and led by Michael English from Clonmel, Co. Tipperary.

This is not a research grant, not a partnership announcement, and not an aspirational five-year roadmap. It is a hardware and access-layer build with a calendar deadline.

Why Ireland needs sovereign quantum, now

Quantum computing is no longer a laboratory curiosity. The transition from classical to post-classical compute will reshape every industry that depends on optimisation, simulation, cryptography, or pattern discovery — which is most of them. The countries that will benefit are the countries that own their access to the technology rather than rent it from elsewhere.

For Ireland, the stakes are particular:

• Pharmaceutical and chemical research. Ireland exports tens of billions of euros of pharmaceuticals each year. Drug-discovery workloads are among the first commercial applications of practical quantum computing — and the country that runs those workloads on its own machines keeps the IP onshore.
• Climate and materials modelling. Carbon-capture chemistry, battery materials, sustainable polymers — all benefit dramatically from quantum simulation. As the founder of IMPT.io, Michael English has spent four years building infrastructure to make climate action the default in travel and shopping. Quantum compute is the next natural layer of that work.
• National security & cryptographic sovereignty. A working cryptographically-relevant quantum computer breaks the public-key cryptography Ireland's banks, government, and citizens depend on every day. Sovereign access to post-classical-ready compute is not optional — it is part of the national security stack.
• AI training under Irish jurisdiction. The next generation of AI models will use quantum-accelerated subroutines for specific classes of problem. Running those workloads in Ireland, on Irish-owned hardware, keeps the most sensitive Irish data in the country's own legal envelope.
• Talent retention. Ireland produces world-class quantum researchers — at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, Maynooth, Tyndall in Cork — and exports almost all of them. A domestic facility gives the next generation a reason to stay, and the previous one a reason to come back.

What sovereign quantum access actually means

The phrase “sovereign quantum” needs a definition before it earns the word. It means three things together, none of which can be substituted:

1. Hardware on Irish soil. The quantum processing unit — whichever modality is selected for the first generation — is physically located in the Republic, with its associated cryogenics and control electronics. No remote-only API access counts; if the hardware is in Sunnyvale, the workload is in Sunnyvale.
2. Irish jurisdiction over the workloads. Every job submitted to the facility is governed by Irish data-protection law and Irish contract law from end to end. There is no clause that exposes Irish workloads to foreign discovery or export-control regimes.
3. Open access, not gated rent. Time on the facility is allocated by a transparent public process — research time, commercial time, government time — rather than auctioned to whichever foreign cloud signs the largest contract. The facility's books are public.

How the twelve-month plan works

The core of the plan is to compose a working facility from technologies that already exist commercially, integrated under Irish ownership, with Irish operating staff, and with a public access layer engineered from day one. Quantum hardware is no longer an unsolved problem at the level we need for first-generation workloads; the unsolved problem is making it available on terms that make sense for a small open European economy. That is an integration problem, not a physics problem.

The first twelve months therefore split into three roughly equal phases:

1. Months 0–4: Site, contracts, vendor selection. Ireland-based site secured. Hardware vendor down-selected from existing commercial QPU manufacturers. Cryogenic and power infrastructure ordered. Operating entity registered, governance established, capital raised against committed compute capacity.
2. Months 4–8: Build & integrate. Hardware shipped, installed, and commissioned. Control and orchestration software deployed. Access layer (queue, scheduler, billing, identity) built on top of standard cloud-native components. First academic partners onboarded for friendly-usage testing.
3. Months 8–12: Open access & first paid workloads. Public access layer opens. First commercial workloads begin running — climate, pharma, financial — on contracted time. By month twelve the facility is operational, billing, and producing scientific output.

Why this is being announced from Clonmel rather than Dublin

The plan does not require, and does not include, a Dublin office. The operating entity is being established in Co. Tipperary because the energy footprint, cooling requirements, and physical-security model of a quantum facility are easier to satisfy outside the capital — and because Michael English's existing operating base is here. The capital city has its place; the actual work, increasingly, does not.

Quantum and climate, considered together

One of the lazy assumptions about new compute is that it will, like its predecessors, be powered by whatever electricity happens to be cheap. Ireland's quantum facility will not be. The build includes a power-procurement plan tied directly to verified renewable generation, a cooling design that uses the local climate to advantage rather than fight it, and a carbon-accounting overlay engineered with the same on-chain offset machinery IMPT.io already uses for hotel bookings. If the facility cannot demonstrate net-positive climate accounting, it will not have permission to operate.

This is not greenwashing. Climate accounting is a hard architectural constraint at every layer of the build, on the same footing as security and uptime.

Ownership & capital

The operating entity is privately held, Irish-incorporated, with Michael English as founder and majority shareholder. Capital is being raised against committed compute capacity from an initial cohort of Irish enterprise customers. The fundraising is by invitation; serious enquiries from institutional investors, sovereign wealth, and strategic partners can reach the founder directly at mike@impt.io.

What success looks like in twelve months

• A live Irish quantum compute facility, on Irish soil, under Irish ownership.
• A public access layer where Irish universities, hospitals, government bodies, and businesses can submit workloads and pay in euro under Irish law.
• At least three Irish multinationals running production-grade quantum workloads on it.
• Net-positive climate accounting verified end-to-end and published openly.
• The first Irish quantum hires returning home from London, Boston, and Zurich.

Twelve months from a public commitment is short. That is the point. The European countries that move slowly on this will spend the rest of the decade renting from countries that did not.

Get involved

Investors, enterprise customers committing compute time, hardware vendors, and Irish quantum researchers should email mike@impt.io. Press & speaking enquiries the same. Calendar at calendly.com/mike-impt/30min.