Silicon Quantum Computing and Schneider Electric Advance Energy Grid Forecasting via Watermelon Quantum-Enhanced AI System

Commercial quantum hardware developer Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) and global energy technology firm Schneider Electric have advanced to Stage 2 of the Australian Government’s Critical Technologies Challenge Program (CTCP). The joint team secured A$3.6 million (US$2.5 million) in funding to deploy hybrid quantum-classical machine learning models across distributed energy resource (DER) networks in partnership with UNSW Sydney.

The collaboration utilizes SQC’s Watermelon™ system, an atomically engineered quantum feature generator designed to accelerate classical machine learning workflows. During Stage 1 evaluations, SQC and Schneider Electric integrated quantum-generated features alongside classical datasets to simulate next-day energy forecasting over a 12-month period. The hybrid models achieved an average 20% improvement in forecasting accuracy relative to standard classical benchmarks, with peak accuracy gains reaching up to 41%.

Building on these results, Stage 2 will scale the deployment across hundreds of residential locations across Australia, directly embedding quantum feature generation into Schneider Electric's production AI pipelines. SQC manufactures its quantum processors using atomic-scale precision in silicon, enabling fast weekly iteration cycles for hardware platforms spanning quantum machine learning (Watermelon™), analog materials simulation (Quantum Twins™), and gate-based quantum processors (Chilli Series).

Review the official press release via PR Newswire here and read our previous coverage on Australia's NRFC $40M AUD investment in Silicon Quantum Computing here.

October 3, 2026