Europe’s quantum startups fear a bureaucratic European Union (EU) administration will take too long to implement its strategy to become a global leader in the emerging technology, while reticent native investors threaten to starve them out of business for want of capital.
With the second administration of European Commission (EC) chief Ursula von der Leyen concerned with US dominance of cloud computing and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), and with fixing the political and economic flaws that have made Europe dependent on foreign technology, it proposed to make amends this summer with an EU Quantum Strategy that plans to push Europe into pre-eminence in a field of technology so immature that leaders have yet to emerge.
The nascent European quantum industry was united in praise of the strategy for its belief that Europe has a real chance of spawning quantum firms that become world leaders in the field, and the extensive plans it has sketched to fulfil its ambition.
The strategy proposes to exploit the advantages Europe boasts in quantum and fix the ailments that nevertheless make prospects for its emerging industry look bleak. Its premise is that Europe excels at academic research but is inept at business.
Its quantum scientists write more academic papers than anywhere else in the world, but US and China have filed around 70% of all patents. While intense public investment in the past half-decade has made Europe home to a third of the world’s quantum startups, deficient capital stranded them just when they need to scale up and take prototype technologies “from the lab to the fab”, as the EU strategy put it in July.
The situation is so dire, EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said when launching the strategy, that its proliferation of startups got a mere 5% of global private investment in quantum – in comparison, a similarly sized US cohort got around half. Virkkunen’s lament was familiar from an EC that has made the “Draghi” diagnosis of broken single and capital markets, and a burdensome bureaucracy, into a programme of government – its defunct union is also blamed for its feeble standing in AI and cloud computing, but its agenda promises fixes.
Virkkunen’s Quantum Strategy meanwhile proposes to make Europe a world leader in quantum by getting member states to agree to combine competing efforts they are already making to create national quantum champions. That “fragmentation” will weaken Europe’s quantum industry, it claims, which will fail and become dependent for its core technology on foreign tech giants who gained from a greater concentration of power. Inter-EU competition is illustrated by €9bn large EU states have invested in quantum for their own advantage, while the central administration invested €2bn for the benefit of all.
It proposes to compensate for the lack of private capital and meagre public funds with “grand challenges” that corral public-private funds for quantum firms which demonstrate potential to turn prototypes into applications for big industrial customers brought in as invigilators. It aims to focus scarce resources on the most promising technologies in a field where plentiful startup investments in speculative inventions have spawned some that are not really capable of making commercially viable products, as quantum CEOs put it to Computer Weekly.
The need for speed
But with the EC saying that its plan shall be presented as a proposal within another proposal for a Quantum Act next year, that will then be negotiated by Member States and Parliament in Europe’s lawmaking process, startups eager to become the next global champions fear it will take too long.
“The European Union should understand that it has to be very, very fast,” said Juha Vartiainen, co-founder and global affairs chief of IQM, a Finnish quantum computing firm counted among Europe’s largest. “If you want to be the leader, then the strategy better be implemented quickly”.
But the “race” was on. US defence research agency DARPA was already running a $6bn challenge, spread among 20 firms, to build a commercially viable quantum computer by 2033. The EU has meanwhile published a strategy with no timeline, said Vartiainen, adding that needs to invest as much as the US, and deliver the money fast, “but the EU is sometimes slow there…that may be the challenge”.
The European Commission is moreover unlikely to find new money for quantum until 2028, when Member States agree its next long-term budget. Until then, it has to muster what money it can. And whereas US programmes are run by experts, focused on results, and make officials accountable for failed projects, EU funding decisions are political, made by administrators, and concerned more with cohesion of the EU than with prosperity, said Vartiainen, who added: “Europe has a lot to learn from the US.”
The strategy promised to pilot the grand challenges next year, with one each in computing and satellite communications. It has won the praise of EU computing firms striving to make theirs the first quantum computer that is stable, scaleable and free of the errors that blight atomic computations, including all those who spoke with Computer Weekly.
The strategy “hits the mark”, said Jason Lynch, CEO of Dublin quantum computing firm Equal1. “But can we get it moving quickly? This is moving at such a pace. Others are investing. Speed will be critical.”
The fragmentation and scarce capital was most apparent for a startup in a country without the financial heft of Germany or France, when national schemes have tended to exclude foreign firms. The US had meanwhile concentrated efforts at DARPA and among large corporations such as IBM, Microsoft and Google.
Having got its break with €10m from Europe’s pooled Innovation fund, Equal1 is striking a deal with investors to raise tens of millions to begin scaling, and will be looking for “multiple hundreds of millions” within five years to commercialise its technology. The strategy was good timing, said Lynch. It showed private investors that had shunned the nascent sector that the EU was committed to it at the highest level.
Sebastian Weidt, CEO of Universal Quantum (UQ), a UK firm with German ties, welcomed the plan for EU competitions that challenged computing firms to fix the problems that prevent them building viable atomic-scale computers.
But its plans were too vague to judge their merit. Europe would spawn the “Google of quantum” only if it supported scaleups sufficiently, said Weidt. UQ had gained from Germany’s national strategy, getting a €70m contract in 2023. But with European private investors having significantly less appetite for quantum than their US counterparts, firms must turn to the US and Middle East for the €100m plus they need to scale up. US quantum firms are consequently better capitalised than European.
“We would like to have anchor investment from Europe. That would be fantastic. But the capital isn’t there in such abundance that you can have that luxury. You need to cast that net a bit wider,” said Weidt, adding that the same was true of the supply chain for UQ’s quantum processors, which is entirely non-European.
The strategy declared a desire to “enable” EU industry to buy quantum computers primarily from EU firms, and to likewise “promote” measures to protect intellectual property to EU firms “to prevent the outflow of critical assets”. But it ignored more protectionist demands that the Quantum Industry Consortium of EU firms made in its submission to the EC’s consultation on the strategy in July.
It also proposed not, as industry wanted, to merge the quantum industrial hubs that large EU states have produced, by their own investment, into a single network administered from Brussels, but merely use central budgets to build others in less wealthy member countries. With work already underway under its more ambitious Chips Act, it is also building expensive infrastructure to pilot and test quantum chip production for small firms that need to industrialise their prototypes as well.
The US has meanwhile been deepening its commercial ties with European countries, with government and industry doing notable quantum deals in Germany, France and the UK. Among a handful of foreign firms accepted onto DARPA’s QBI, was France’s Alice & Bob. Its $300m-a-piece programme also aims to win the race to demonstrate quantum computing is viable.
Source link
