One of the most prominent research areas in information technology is the Internet of things (IoT) as its applications are widely used such as structural monitoring, health care management systems, agriculture and battlefield management, and so on. Due to its self-organizing network and simple installation of the network, the researchers have been attracted to pursue research in the various fields of IoTs. However, a huge amount of work has been addressed on various problems confronted by IoT. The nodes densely deploy over critical environments and those are operated on tiny batteries. Moreover, the replacement of dead batteries in the nodes is almost impractical. Therefore, the problem of energy preservation and maximization of IoT networks has become the most prominent research area. However, numerous state-of-the-art algorithms have addressed this issue. Thus, it has become necessary to gather the information and send it to the base station in an optimized method to maximize the network. Therefore, we propose a novel quantum-informed ant colony optimization (ACO) routing algorithm with the efficient encoding scheme of cluster head selection and derivation of information heuristic factors. The algorithm has been tested by simulation for various network scenarios. The simulation results of the proposed algorithm show its efficacy over a few existing evolutionary algorithms using various performance metrics such as residual energy of the network, network lifetime, and the number of live IoT nodes. © 2022 IEEE