Award winner · GIC 2026 · 2nd worldwide
Award winner, 2nd place worldwide, GIC 2026 Advanced Materials track (Mitsubishi Chemical Group × AIST).
The award was presented at Quantum World Congress 2026. The Advanced Materials track asked teams to scale an AI-driven quantum chemistry method on problems that matter for materials discovery, across three phases from January to July 2026.
Merlin chose a real industrial target: the tin-oxo cluster at the core of metal-oxide photoresists used in EUV lithography. It carried the material from CPU to GPU to quantum processor, ran the chemistry at 40 qubits (about twice the published scale), cut training from a published 173 GPU-hours to minutes on one GPU, and ranked four resist formulations in the right order on quantum hardware before any were made.
A judged result. Mitsubishi Chemical Group and AIST set the challenge track; the award does not imply their endorsement of Merlin Quantum or its products. GIC challenge page (pqic.org) ↗
