Quantum computing in Colombia: research, funding, business

Last reviewed: September 2026.

Quantum computing in Colombia in 2026 is a research and training story, not yet an industry. The country has one two-qubit teaching machine (Quipu, at Universidad de los Andes), an ion-trap processor under development at Universidad del Valle, a COP 30,000 million quantum metrology project led by Universidad Nacional, and a yearly Minciencias call that puts a few billion pesos into quantum projects. If you run a company here, the near-term opportunity is post-quantum security and talent, not buying quantum hardware.

The details below are dated and linked so you can check them. We will update this page as calls close and projects report results.

Does Colombia have a quantum computer?

Yes, but it is a teaching instrument. On 27 November 2024 Universidad de los Andes announced the arrival of Quipu, a SpinQ Gemini Lab with two qubits that works by nuclear magnetic resonance. Students chose the name in a campus contest; a quipu is the knotted-cord record system of the Andes.

Quipu is useful for what it was bought for. It lets physics and systems engineering students run more than 300 experiments on real qubits instead of only simulators. It cannot run anything a laptop can’t. For research-scale work, Colombian groups use cloud access to IBM, IonQ, Quantinuum or other foreign machines, as researchers do almost everywhere in Latin America.

The more ambitious hardware effort is in Cali. On 18 June 2025 Minciencias presented the work of Universidad del Valle’s Centro de Investigación e Innovación en Bioinformática y Fotónica (CiBioFi) on what it called the first national quantum processor, based on trapped ions. The ministry described quantum gates, specialized laboratories and training. It gave no qubit target, completion date or budget, so treat it as an early-stage build.

Who does quantum research in Colombia?

Most of the work sits in five or six public and private universities, plus the national metrology institute. The table lists the groups with public, checkable activity.

Medellín deserves a note because it is where AndesQubit is based. The Quantum Colombia programme at Universidad Nacional’s Medellín campus is described in a 2024 arXiv paper by Cristian Bello, Benjamin Harper, Camilo Castro and Alcides Montoya as roughly 55 professors and students, with streamed courses that reached tens of thousands of views. The same paper calls it the only programme of its kind in the country. That is a small base, but it is real, and its material is free and in Spanish.

There are also community groups. QColombia, a volunteer chapter of the international QWorld network, runs workshops and seminars. Short courses exist too: the Escuela Colombiana de Ingeniería Julio Garavito ran a quantum computing course from 23 January to 24 April 2026, and Universidad Nacional’s Bogotá science faculty offers an introductory course.

How much does Colombia invest in quantum technology?

Public quantum funding in Colombia is measured in billions of pesos per year, not trillions, and most of it comes bundled with artificial intelligence. Here are the figures we could confirm from primary sources.

The 2026 call is the one to read closely if you run a company. Proposals had to come from alliances of a university (which executes the project), a Colombian company as technology partner, and a local or regional organization that brings the problem. The quantum lines were quantum information processing and secure communications, quantum sensing and metrology, and sustainable energy and strategic minerals. Applications closed on 13 April 2026 and Minciencias scheduled the list of funded projects for 30 June 2026.

The royalty project also produced two things beyond papers. One is the INM laboratory mentioned above. The other is the Red Nacional de Ciencias y Tecnologías Cuánticas, a national network that invites universities, research centers, government and companies to join, and was created with that project’s money (BPIN 2022000100133).

Does Colombia have a national quantum strategy?

No formal one, as of September 2026. We found no published document comparable to Chile’s Estrategia Nacional de Tecnologías Cuánticas 2025 to 2035 or to the multi-year federal plans in Brazil. Colombia’s quantum policy lives in Minciencias calls, royalty projects and ministerial speeches that frame quantum as a matter of “technological sovereignty.”

This matters for companies because calls change every year and there is no multi-year budget to plan around. It also means the research community sets much of the agenda itself. If you want to compare Colombia with its neighbors in detail, our piece on Latin America’s quantum strategies puts Chile, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia side by side.

What does the private sector say?

Colombian executives are interested in quantum but few are acting on the security side. An IBM Institute for Business Value study (The Enterprise in 2030), reported on 3 June 2026, found:

• 53% of Colombian executives expect AI and quantum computing to transform their industry before 2030.
• 13% expect to be using quantum technology actively by 2030.
• 33% of organizations are preparing with quantum-resistant cryptography today.
• 71% of Latin American organizations name the lack of specialized skills as a barrier.

Read the 53% and the 33% together. Most boards think quantum will matter, and two-thirds of organizations have not started the one piece of work that has deadlines attached: moving off RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography.

Is anyone in Colombia preparing for post-quantum cryptography?

Yes, and this is where most of the real commercial activity is. Bogotá-based Cyte sells cryptographic products to the financial sector and counts ACH Colombia, the interbank payments operator supervised by the Superintendencia Financiera, among its clients. In June 2026 CINTEL convened the first Mesa Sectorial de Criptografía Poscuántica, with government, academia, banks and critical infrastructure, to raise awareness and draft policy recommendations.

What Colombia does not have is a regulatory deadline. We found no Superintendencia Financiera circular that requires a post-quantum transition plan as of September 2026. Colombian banks and exporters will feel pressure anyway, through global card networks, cloud providers and US and European counterparties that are on 2030 to 2035 timelines. Our article on post-quantum readiness for Latin American banks covers that chain in detail.

Where are the business opportunities in Colombia?

For most Colombian companies the realistic opportunities in 2026 fall into three groups, and only one of them involves running quantum algorithms.

The first is security migration. Any organization that keeps data confidential for ten years or more (banks, insurers, health providers, pension funds, telecom operators) needs a cryptographic inventory and a migration plan. This is ordinary engineering work, it can start now, and it is the part that comes with external deadlines. See our post-quantum cryptography migration service and the banking and finance page.

The second is research alliances. The ColombIA Inteligente model rewards companies that bring a real problem to a university. Energy and strategic minerals are named lines, which fits Colombian utilities, oil and mining firms. A funded alliance is a cheap way to test an optimization or sensing idea without betting the budget. Our page on energy and utilities lists the problem types that fit.

The third is talent. With 71% of regional firms citing a skills gap, training engineers who already know linear algebra, optimization or security is often the best first spend. Colombia has more free material in Spanish than most people expect, from the Medellín streams to QColombia.

What is not an opportunity yet: buying quantum hardware, or hiring a vendor that promises quantum advantage on your logistics problem this year. No Colombian company that we know of has published a production quantum workload, and outside a few narrow research tasks, neither has anyone else.

What to watch in the next 12 months

• The list of quantum projects funded by ColombIA Inteligente 2026, and whether a fourth edition is announced.
• Any Univalle publication with a qubit count or a gate fidelity for its ion-trap processor.
• Whether the Mesa Sectorial de Criptografía Poscuántica produces recommendations that the Superintendencia Financiera or MinTIC adopt.
• New work from the INM laboratory and the Red Nacional de Ciencias y Tecnologías Cuánticas.

If you want to know what this means for your own organization, start with a quantum readiness assessment. It sorts the security work that has a clock on it from the computing topics you can safely watch from a distance, and we run it in Spanish or English from Medellín.