Is the Azure Quantum team considering to offer a PennyLane plugin?

Question

Is the Azure Quantum team considering to offer a PennyLane plugin?

Mark Buningh 20

Hi

On behalf of the quantum application team at TNO, The Netherlands, I was wondering whether you are considering to offer a PennyLane plugin?

Almost all quantum hardware has a PennyLane plugin. However, these can't be used with Azure's API keys. Azure's "recommended" option is to translate to Qiskit and then translate to the appropriate Azure tool. While that's perfectly doable for a script with a simple algorithm, it's not maintainable in a large codebase. Every time something changes in PennyLane, Qiskit, or Azure, every package has to be updated.

As an alternative we're now developing this PennyLane-Azure plugin ourselves. Would be great if we could exchange some thoughts on this.

Thank you,

Mark Buningh

<PII Removed>@tno.nl

Anonymous

2025-10-06T18:29:50.2566667+00:00

Hello @Mark Buningh ,

Just checking in if you got a chance to review my earlier response!

Let me know if it answered your query.

Answer accepted by question author

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Your answer

Anonymous

2025-10-06T18:29:50.2566667+00:00

Hello @Mark Buningh ,

Just checking in if you got a chance to review my earlier response!

Let me know if it answered your query.

Answer 1

Anonymous

Hello @Mark Buningh ,

I checked it with Azure Quantum Engineering team and there are no plans at the moment to build PennyLane plugin.

As a work-around they shared below suggestions:

PennyLane did recently add the ability to export to QASM (see https://github.com/PennyLaneAI/pennylane/pull/7393).
The QDK has the ability to compile QASM (see: https://github.com/microsoft/qdk/blob/main/samples/notebooks/openqasm.ipynb)
which you could then submit to Azure (see https://github.com/microsoft/qdk/blob/main/samples/notebooks/azure_submission.ipynb). This haven't been tried yet by the team, but if the export to QASM is valid this could be a suitable workaround. If it doesn't, please log an issue at the github repo.

Let me know if this answers your query!

Mark Buningh 20 Reputation points

2025-10-07T08:28:25.8+00:00

Thank you Ankit. For us, this would be a workaround that will be hard to maintain over time - so we're going to continue our work on the plugin ourselves. Kind regards, Mark
Anonymous

2025-10-07T10:14:01.92+00:00

Hello @Mark Buningh

In that case, I'd highly recommend sharing your feedback here :

https://feedback.azure.com/

This will notify the engineering team internally with the feedback based on which they can plan for the feature.

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