Chattanooga Utility EPB Buys a $22 Million Quantum Computer

EPB, the city-owned utility that powers Chattanooga, Tennessee, switched on a $22 million IonQ Forte Enterprise quantum computer on Sept. 18, and its own engineers get to use it before anyone else does.

The machine sits inside the EPB Quantum Center and is IonQ's fourth-generation commercial system, according to a joint press release from EPB and IonQ. The $22 million price for the hardware itself was reported by the Chattanooga Times Free Press, which said EPB is a municipally owned power distributor, not a research lab or a cloud vendor.

What 36 qubits actually means here

Forte Enterprise carries 36 physical qubits, rated at what IonQ calls an algorithmic-qubit score of AQ36, with one-qubit gate error around 0.02 percent and two-qubit gate error around 0.4 percent, according to IonQ's own product page. Instead of etching transistors into silicon, the system traps individual ytterbium atoms and controls them with lasers, and it ships in a rack-mountable chassis sized for a standard data center rather than a physics building.

36 qubits sounds small next to the thousand-plus-qubit superconducting chips IBM and Google have shown. It is not directly comparable: IonQ's trapped ions connect to every other qubit in the system, while denser superconducting layouts typically connect only to their nearest neighbors. Whether that trade-off matters depends entirely on the algorithm, and IonQ has not published Forte Enterprise results against a benchmark methodology run by an outside party such as IBM or Quantinuum.

EPB's own fellows get first access

Access is not going to the highest bidder. Eight graduate researchers, called EPB Quantum Computing Fellows and funded by a $4 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, are the system's first users, EPB said in the press release. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is next, starting projects in early October 2026, when EPB opens the machine to paying business customers through EPBQuantum.com. Vanderbilt University is still lining up its first project, according to the release.

EPB Chief Executive Janet Rehberg said the sequencing is deliberate: "Access to a quantum computer is rare and valuable. We're starting with our own work to directly benefit our customers." Robert Long, EPB's president of strategic initiatives, told the Times Free Press that fellows and university partners will "rent time on the computer, run their algorithms, see their results, understand those results and toss them back to their offices."

The job is grid switches, not chemistry

The fellows' first assignment skips the usual quantum-computing demonstration subjects. Instead, the initial algorithms target how EPB runs its own smart electric grid switches, aiming to cut power loss and customer costs, the Times Free Press reported. Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly told the paper that a municipal utility running the project is "downright bizarre in the best way."

The same hardware, priced by the shot

IonQ does not only sell Forte-class systems outright. The identical architecture is available today through Amazon's Braket cloud service at $0.30 per task plus $0.08 per shot, with a minimum of 2,500 shots per task once error mitigation is turned on, according to AWS's published Braket pricing page. Dividing EPB's $22 million purchase price by that per-shot rate works out to roughly 275 million shots of rented queue time, a comparison this reporting calculated, not a figure either company has published.

Access path	Sticker cost	Qubits	Gate errors (1Q / 2Q)
EPB-owned Forte Enterprise	$22 million upfront	36	0.02% / 0.4%
Amazon Braket rental	$0.30/task + $0.08/shot	36	0.02% / 0.4%

What decides which path wins is utilization. A rented queue costs nothing on the days nobody submits a job; a $22 million capital purchase depreciates whether the fellows are running algorithms on a given Tuesday or not. EPB is betting that owning the box, plus the training and the local access it buys its own engineers, is worth more than the flexibility of paying only for shots used.

IonQ's bigger bet on the city

IonQ is not treating Chattanooga as a one-off equipment sale. The company is separately investing $15 million to build a Tennessee Quantum Communications Research Center in the city and expects to create about two dozen jobs there, IonQ Chairman and Chief Executive Niccolo de Masi said in the release. EPB projects the combined effort, including university research activity, will generate $1.1 billion in economic impact over a decade, the Times Free Press reported, though the paper did not detail how that figure was calculated.

Quobly is fabricating a competing quantum chip on a commercial 300-millimeter silicon line, a reminder that IonQ's trapped-ion approach is one of several competing for the same government and utility budgets. EPB's decision to buy capital equipment outright also puts it in the same conversation as Samsung and SK Hynix's refusal of a Korean utility's $18 billion power prepayment plan: compute buyers and power utilities are increasingly negotiating over the same balance sheet.

What has not been shown yet

Neither EPB nor IonQ has published a result showing the Forte Enterprise system outperforming a classical computer on the grid-switching problem it was bought to help solve, and no date has been set for that comparison. Rehberg said only that the utility's "quantum computer is open for business," not that it has finished a job. The next fixed date is early October 2026, when UTC's paying access begins; what EPB's own fellows will have produced by then has not been disclosed.