Insider Brief:
- ICQE 2025 brought together scientists, founders, policymakers, and technologists to confront how we power the exponential rise of intelligence without exhausting the planet’s energy systems.
- The conference emphasized that quantum technologies must be developed not just for performance, but with sustainability in mind from optimizing power distribution and modeling cleaner materials to designing inherently efficient information systems.
- Speakers spoke to the need for interdisciplinary collaboration, encouraging a shift from siloed expertise to a shared vision that aligns scientific progress with societal and ecological responsibility.
- Italy’s upcoming National Quantum Strategy, announced at the event, exemplifies how nations are beginning to integrate quantum into broader policy.
Padua is a city where knowledge runs deep. Its quiet streets, lined with centuries-old arcades and echoes of Galileo’s lectures, remind us of both the everlasting and ever-evolving nature of science. For a few days this June, the city welcomed a gathering of physicists, students, founders, policymakers, and researchers–all convened to explore a question that has moved from the philosophical to the urgent:
What will it take to fuel the future of intelligence?
Emerging technologies such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and high-performance systems are often framed as inevitabilities, the tools that will transform how we work, discover, and live. But for all our talk of scale, optimization, and acceleration, we spend far less time reckoning with what these systems demand in return. Intelligence, in any form, consumes energy. And in an era defined by climate volatility, geopolitical tension, and exponential compute growth, energy is not a background concern but the constraint.
AI, once considered a distant dream, is now embedded in everything from our search engines to our governance systems. But its rise brings with it staggering infrastructure needs such as data center land grabs, grid strain, and unsustainable energy footprints. And as we further develop our artificial intelligence capabilities and increasingly autonomous systems, the question shifts from what these tools can do to whether our energy systems can keep up.
That’s what makes ICQE 2025 stand out. The conference didn’t ask whether we would build the future. It assumed we would. The real question was can we build it wisely? Could quantum help lighten the energy load of intelligence? And, perhaps more radically, can we turn the very technologies fueling the demand into part of the solution?
“It is the cost of energy that ultimately will define the cost of intelligence.”
Francesco Campaioli, the conference’s co-chair, opened with that powerful line. This was a call to conscience. As quantum technologies mature, he reminded us, we are not simply building faster computers or more sensitive sensors. We are laying the foundations of future infrastructure. And with that comes both an extraordinary opportunity, and a non-negotiable responsibility, to ensure these systems do not reproduce the same extractive patterns we hope they transcend.
Quantum technology has potential to create change across the energy landscape from optimizing power distribution, to simulating new catalytic materials, to reimagining information systems that consume orders of magnitude less power. But these possibilities can’t be retrofitted onto a system built in isolation. If we are to design quantum systems that contribute meaningfully to global sustainability, we must start with that intention rather than arrive at it as an afterthought.
Campaioli was clear: that requires more than technical progress. It demands collaboration across disciplines and sectors. “In this auditorium,” he said, “we are not only physicists. There are colleagues from chemistry, from math, from engineering… from industry, from press, from funding agencies. We must find a way to communicate effectively, beyond the obstacle of technical jargon.”
That, too, is a form of sustainability. Not just in what we build, but in how we build it, how we communicate it, and with whom.
Quantum, Energy, and the Responsibility of Vision
In a field so often defined by potential, ICQE offered the rarity of focus not just on what quantum technologies might achieve, but on where they’re most urgently needed. It was a reminder that scientific progress, if kept distanced from purpose, risks becoming an end in itself. As the quantum industry moves from theory to tangible systems, the goal becomes to build with intention. The intersection of quantum and energy may be one of the most consequential places to explore that.
Quantum will not be a singular development. Rather, it will continually influence how we see, simulate, and interact with the physical world. And in the face of an escalating energy crisis fueled in part by the rise of AI and the computational arms race, three dimensions of this convergence stood out at ICQE 2025.
First, quantum research deepens our understanding of physical phenomena at the most fundamental level. Concepts such as coherence, entanglement, and thermalization are invitations to rethink the very mechanics of energy. As our ability to understand and manipulate quantum systems improves, we may beget new approaches to heat management, dissipation, and control that are not only more efficient, but fundamentally different from classical designs. This is already influencing ideas around next-generation cooling systems, quantum engines, and thermodynamic protocols.
Second, quantum computing could lead to more sustainable information processing. As AI workloads expand in size and insatiable appetite, the environmental toll of inference and training runs becomes increasingly impossible (and irresponsible) to ignore. Quantum processors, especially those designed with energy efficiency in mind, could offload specific tasks currently performed by high-power GPUs. These aren’t just technical upgrades, but rather design choices that reflect a broader ethic that scalability and sustainability must grow hand in hand.
Third, quantum simulation and sensing are relevant to the discovery, understanding, and creation of materials. From photovoltaics to hydrogen catalysts to solid-state batteries, our ability to model complex quantum systems may become the bottleneck or the accelerator for energy innovation. These technologies offer the potential for faster pathways to cleaner materials, not through trial and error, but through direct modeling and manipulation of the quantum properties that govern their behavior.
Together, these three dimensions (foundational insight, computational efficiency, and materials discovery) form a kind of scaffold to show how a sustained, interdisciplinary effort can affect how quantum serves the energy future. Because while quantum will most likely not solve the energy crisis alone, it could become one of its most powerful tools if we’re intentional in how we design, deploy, and direct its growth.
Ultimately, in the end, these technologies only matter if we continue to ask not only what quantum can do but also what it should do.
Signals from Italy: A National Quantum Strategy
During the opening sessions, Simone Montangero shared that Italy is preparing to release its National Quantum Strategy later this year. A part of this initiative is the formation of the Italian Quantum Alliance, a national effort headquartered in Padua that will bring together universities, research institutes, and industrial partners to coordinate and strengthen Italy’s capabilities in quantum science and technology.
The significance of this is in a shared understanding that quantum is both scientific endeavor and a strategic one. By securing a place for quantum within its broader industrial and technological agenda, Italy is joining a growing number of nations recognizing that applications of quantum technology may have a profound effect on the future of energy, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and economic competitiveness.
For those of us focused on aligning quantum development with real-world needs, signals like this are not to be missed. They influence how partnerships are formed, how resources are distributed, and how seriously the public and private sectors take the work ahead. And in a gathering centered on the convergence of quantum and energy, two of the most arguably powerful forces in our era, this commitment to national coordination is affirmation.
Scientific Spotlights: Where Quantum Meets Energy
While much of ICQE 2025 centered around the broader question of how we fuel future intelligence, several talks stood out for their scientific depth and potential real-world implications. The following are just a few of the sessions that exemplified the conference’s interdisciplinary rigor and long-term relevance:
- Cristiane Koch, Freie Universität Berlin — What does it take to cool many-body quantum systems?
Dr. Christiane Koch presented a new approach to cooling quantum many-body systems, which is a relevant step for quantum computing, simulation, and sensing. Traditional cooling techniques often require detailed knowledge of the system’s internal structure, but this new method was designed to work with with little or no such information. By coupling the system to a set of auxiliary qubits and then resetting them repeatedly, energy is extracted in a way that mimics a natural cooling process. The protocol is universal, meaning it works across a range of models, including spin chains and frustrated systems, without needing to tailor the cooling setup to each case. It also avoids the need for complicated interactions or measurements. This could have wide-reaching implications for scalable quantum technologies, providing a simple tool to prepare low-energy quantum states across diverse platforms.
- Jeremy Stevens, Alice & Bob — Energy consumption of a repetition code based on superconducting cat-qubits
Jeremy Stevens from Alice & Bob explored the energy efficiency of logical qubits built from cat qubits, a superconducting qubit architecture that encodes information in coherent states within microwave resonators. By leaning on the natural noise bias of cat qubits where bit-flip errors are exponentially suppressed they simplify quantum error correction using a 1D repetition code, reducing the number of required physical qubits. The presentation introduced a detailed framework for estimating the idealized power consumption of these systems, focusing on the energetic cost of stabilizing cat states via engineered dissipation. Simulations showed that even under realistic constraints, logical qubits built this way may be compatible with current cryogenic and microwave infrastructure.
- Filippo Vicentini, École Polytechnique — Neural Quantum Simulation of Quantum Dynamics: Recent advances and limitations
This talk presented a powerful overview of how neural network-based variational methods can be used quantum simulation, especially for the notoriously difficult quantum many-body problem. By combining compact neural representations of quantum states with Monte Carlo sampling, researchers can efficiently approximate ground states, phase diagrams, and even some excited states, with the potential to surpass traditional tensor network methods in expressiveness. While neural networks can theoretically represent highly entangled states, the speaker highlighted that a challenge in finding these states as entanglement grows. For dynamics (simulating how quantum systems evolve in time), several new techniques were introduced, including global action minimization and time-evolving optimization strategies but this remains open for exploration. Overall, neural quantum states may be a versatile toolset for modern quantum simulation.
- Beatrice Donelli, CNR-INO Istituto Nazionale di Ottica — Charging a quantum spin network towards Heisenberg-limited precision
Donelli introduced a quantum battery charging protocol that uses a spin network and exploits quantum phase transitions to achieve super-extensive precision, meaning that the accuracy of the charging process scales faster than the size of the system. The talk compared two approaches: a local protocol, where each spin is charged independently, and a cooperative protocol, where collective spin interactions are used to drive the system through a phase transition, enhancing sensitivity and enabling more efficient charging. Implemented on the D-Wave Advantage quantum annealer, the cooperative protocol demonstrated higher final magnetization and better precision scaling, reaching close to the Heisenberg limit even on noisy hardware. The results suggest that engineered correlations in many-body systems can increase precision without requiring entanglement.
- Beatriz Polo Rodríguez, Institut de Ciències Fotoniques, (ICFO) Barcelona — Detecting entanglement from work extraction
This lecture explored how thermodynamic quantities, specifically energy and work, can serve as practical indicators of quantum entanglement, especially in Gaussian states within continuous-variable systems. The study focused on a measure called the ergotropic gap, which captures how much work can be extracted from a system globally versus locally. For entangled states, this gap is nonzero, making it a potential entanglement witness that avoids the resource-heavy demands of full quantum tomography. They derived upper and lower bounds for this gap using Gaussian passivity and the PPT criterion, showing that their method can not only detect entanglement but also separability. While some challenges remain, especially around experimental implementation and optimization, this opens a promising bridge between quantum thermodynamics and quantum information theory, potentially enabling more efficient characterization of quantum states.
A Mirror to Our Ambitions
ICQE 2025 was a conference and a mirror. One that reflected not only where we are in the development of quantum technologies, but where we hope to go and what it might cost us to get there. It presented us with an urgent challenge to ensure that intelligence, in all its accelerating forms, does not outpace the wisdom required to wield it.
Energy is the cost of progress. But with the right technologies, the right questions, and the right conversations, it doesn’t have to be the cost of everything else.
Quantum requires more spaces like this that are deliberate, interdisciplinary, and unafraid to sit with complexity. Not because they promise resolution, because this is years in the making, but because they remind us that the pursuit of knowledge is technical, ethical, ecological, and human.
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