Is Europe Poised To Lead the Quantum Computing Race? - Forbes

InnovationTransportation Is Europe Poised To Lead the Quantum Computing Race? BySabbir Rangwala, Senior Contributor. Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about perception, sensors, autonomy, AI and computing Follow Author Mar 10, 2026, 07:00am EDTMar 11, 2026, 11:11am EDT 0 Europe's fastest supercomputer Jupiter is pictured after it was inaugurated on September 5, 2025 at the Supercomputing Centre in Juelich, western Germany. Jupiter is Europe's first "exascale" supercomputer — meaning it will be able to perform at least one quintillion (or one billion billion) calculations per second. The computers' operators hope it can help the continent in everything from climate research to catching up in the artificial intelligence race. (Photo by INA FASSBENDER / AFP) (Photo by INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images The Jülich Supercomputing Centre announced in February 2025, that it is permanently incorporating the U.S.-based D-Wave annealing quantum computer after three years of successful hosting and usage. The system will be connected to JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) supercomputer, Europe’s first and only exascale supercomputer (1018 calculations per second, 1000 times faster than previous systems). Other notable events in the Europe quantum landscape: IQM, a Finland-based quantum computing (QC) start-up, and a leading European player, just announced a merger with a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company which will take it public in the United States. The deal will value IQM at $1.8B and provide funding for advancing its fault tolerant QC platform towards large scale commercialization. Cambridge Quantum, which was founded in Cambridge, U.K. in 2014, merged in 2018 with Honeywell Quantum Solutions, which evolved into Quantinuum in 2021. It is majority owned by Honeywell, and headquartered in the United States. NVIDIA invested in a 2025 round that raised $600M at a valuation of $10B. As part of Honeywell spinning off its various business units, Quantinuum has filed to go public. US-listed IonQ acquired UK-based Oxford Ionics for more than $1 billion, in September 2025. A previous article discussed the state of quantum in the United States. While the U.S. clearly currently leads, will Europe emerge as a dominant competitor? After missing the AI, semiconductor, social media and smartphone booms, and a struggling automotive sector, will quantum technology provide Europe with a new commercial edge? The examples above show Europe’s abilities in this emerging field. Clearly, the United States values early quantum work in Europe, and the potential its market it provides. The question is what it means for European leadership in the emerging field of all things quantum? Is Europe destined to become a quantum incubator for the United States? Government policy, industry support, venture and institutional funding, public markets and talent all play a big role. Europe has excellent universities and a rich talent pool in disciplines such as physics, engineering and computer science to draw from. Can they retain this pool in Europe or lose it to the United States? Europe’s public markets for technology start-ups are unfortunately not as attractive as the United States. State funding is increasing as highlighted in a recent report, with ~$14B in funding committed over the past 5 years. This has encouraged EU-based private investments in quantum tech. (the lucrative gains via rich U.S.-based acquisitions are probably a bigger factor). Will European policy makers be successful in ensuring that Europe has control and leadership in the emerging arena? Time will tell. Firgun Ventures - Helping Quantum Entrepreneurs Scale Based in London, U.K., this is a $250M venture fund, specializing in early growth-stage quantum technology investments. It combines academic, operational and financial expertise  to nurture its investments in this growing area. Founded by Dr. Kris Naudts (a neuroscientist by training) and Zeynep Koruturk—both early angel investors in Cambridge Quantum (now Quantinuum), and supported with funding from the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Firgun aims to be the first choice for finance and advice to founders in the quantum space who are ready to scale their company from seed to a Series A/B stage. MORE FOR YOU Firgun invests globally, and recently announced its first two strategic investments - the first in Photonic Inc, a Vancouver, Canada-based company focused on quantum teleportation, and the second in Los Angeles, California-based Quantum Elements, which specializes in digital twin simulations for design and virtual testing of quantum circuits before deploying them on physical quantum processors. The next investment (to be announced late March 2026) is in a U.K.-based company. Apart from the deep entrepreneurial and scientific training of its founders, Firgun also has strong relationships within the U.K. golden triangle of academic excellence - Cambridge, Oxford and London Universities. Prof. Mete Atatüre, a Professor of Physics @ Cambridge’s Cavendish Lab. serves as the company’s academic advisor. The combined expertise is used to vet potential investments for technical and commercial feasibility. As part of its outreach to the quantum community, Firgun hosts the TTQ (Time to Talk Quantum) podcast. In the first episode, Dr. Naudt was joined by co-founder Zeynap Koruturk and Professor Mete Atature, to discuss the practical foundations of quantum technology (Figure 1): Figure 1: Inaugural Episode of TTQ (Time to Talk Quantum), March 3, 2026 Firgun Episode 2 goes live today (March 10, 2026) and discusses the intersection of art and quantum, and what it means to be alive at a moment when science, art, and imagination are evolving together. Episode 3 (to be launched March 17, 2026) dives into quantum applications in defense, with defense tech experts, Joab Rosenberg, Partner at US-Israeli deep tech fund Deep33, and John Ridge CBE, Chief Adoption Officer at the NATO Innovation Fund. Both episodes can be viewed at 7 am US EST (1 pm CET) at the listed dates above. Firgun believes that Europe needs to establish itself as a leader in the quantum ecosystem space. Apart from business and employment impacts, the need to be self-sufficient in this technology is critical given the global logistics and supply chain considerations and security implications (export control regulations), complicated by ever more protective international trade and export policies. Of the ~ 500 quantum startups world-wide, a third are situated in Western Europe. According to Dr. Naudt, “we expect that a sizeable part of our eventual portfolio will be in European quantum scaleups, and that we will meaningfully contribute to help solve this longstanding pain point for Europe, i.e. the scaling of its own deep-tech and quantum startups”. IQM - Quantum Computers, Built For Real Impact IQM was founded in 2018 as a spin-off from Aalto University in Finland, and commercializes on-premise full-stack quantum computers accessed via a cloud platform by its global academic and industrial customers. The initial focus was in developing large scale quantum processing units (QPUs). This evolved into a building and delivering full-stack quantum computers that help create ecosystems for the quantum community worldwide. As mentioned above, the company has filed to go public via a SPAC transaction with a U.S. based company sometime in 2026, valuing it at $1.8B. CEO Jan Goetz, a quantum scientist and academic at Aalto University, clarified that the company would still be headquartered and listed on the Finland Stock Exchange, with the SPAC transaction enabling ADR (American Depositary Receipt) investments from a stronger stock market climate in the United States. In terms of product focus, it concentrates on making practical quantum computers that does not need elaborately conditioned space, and is mounted on the familiar 19" rack assemblies utilized by conventional computers, with access to cooling water, electricity and network connections. Figure 2: (Left) - IQM Radiance QC with 20 High-Fidelity Qubits, Upgradable to 54 and 150 Qubits. (Right) - Resonance Cloud Platform IQM New versions of its processing chips will enable upgrades of the above platform. These chips are designed and built in a captive 200 mm Silicon Fab (funded by the EU) that uses standard lithography tools, complemented with material processing and deposition of superconducting materials like aluminum and Niobium at low temperatures. The EU funding of the fab is part of the goal of establishing a supply chain for critical components in Europe. According to Dr. Goetz, the EU is perfect for developing quantum tech and products, because of the academic expertise and talent it generates, the lower cost of recruiting and retaining this talent, and easy access to funding from government and EU-wide sources, and private funding through family and pension fund-led venture funds. The United States is attractive as a market, and source for investments in the public market. The latter enables liquid capital for scaling production and acquisitions. IQM generated $18M revenues in 2024, doubling to $35M in 2025. The current revenue pipeline is $100M. Per Dr. Goetz, “we have been investing a lot into our infrastructure – a chip factory and assembly line in Finland and a quantum data center in Germany. With a strong supply chain and top talent, Europe has a real shot at leading the global quantum race. To create global leadership, it must continue scaling companies to translate scientific advancements into industrial strength”. Sparrow Quantum - Reliably Delivering Single Photons A spin-off from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, the company was established a decade ago, and started commercial R&D and operations in 2020. It recently announced $35M in Series A funding, with participation from Denmark-based North Ventures, Scale Capital, and Jacob Jakobsen Gruppen ApS, LIFTT EuroInvest (European Investment Bank) and LIFTT, an Italian venture capital firm. This augments a seed funding round of $25M in April 2025, and a recent announcement of Sparrow leading the €50M European Photonics for Quantum (P4Q) pilot line for semiconductor processing and standards development. Dr. Peter Lodahl, Sparrow’s co-founder and CQO (Chief Quantum Officer) is on P4Q’s executive board. Dr. Lodahl was a Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, and currently works full-time as a Sparrow (this is what the company’s employees are affectionately called). There are more than 50 Sparrows working to move quantum technology forward, specifically in the area of single photon semiconductor sources. It turns out that ordinary lasers used for communications, sensing and materials processing cannot produce a single photon reliably, on demand, a capability is critical for using a photon as a qubit or a carrier of quantum information. Per Dr. Lodahl, doing this in a scalable way paves the path for realizing reliable quantum computers. Sparrow designs and fabricates single photon laser sources using quantum dot expertise developed at the Niels Bohr Institute. It involves heterogenous deposition of epitaxial GaAs (Gallium Arsenide) material on waveguides in SiN (Silicon Nitride) wafers which are then processed using classical techniques used manufacture standard lasers. The epitaxial growth and deposition in SiN is done in Sparrow’s fabrication facilities in Copenhagen, Denmark. The Sparrow Core is the heart of the single photon source. The integrated 3 × 3 mm chip is made from indium arsenide/gallium arsenide quantum dot structures embedded in photonic crystal waveguides, sectioned into an array of structures engineered for emitting highly coherent single photons at specific wavelengths between 920 and 980 nm. Efforts are also underway to produce sources emitting at 1310 nm to support fiber-optics communications. Figure 3 shows the Sparrow Nest, the company’s integrated chip and rack-mounted single photon emitter product. Figure 3: Sparrow Nest Fully Integrated Rack-Mounted Single Photon Source Product with Sparrow Core, InP-InGaAs Quantum Dot Laser Sparrow Quantum Dr. Lodahl believes "that the EU has outstanding talents and a burgeoning awareness that we cannot afford to miss the opportunity in quantum, and we can build agile and truly collaborative teams which is essential to be competitive in this arena. We need to make bets in areas where EU has a true competitive leadership – quantum photonics is such an area. The EU does win gold medals at the Olympics but not in all disciplines at once!” Universal Quantum - Building Quantum Machines that Scale Universal Quantum (UQ) was founded in 2018 by Sebastian Weidt (CEO) and Winfried Hensinger (Chairman), who met as academics in the quantum physics department at the University of Sussex. The company has a global list of investors including IQT (IN-Q-TEL, the venture arm of the United States Central Intelligence Agency), Nauto Capital and Hoxton Ventures, and has secured over $10M in non-dilutive grants. UQ’s focus is to make quantum computers work reliably at scale. This can enable efficient modeling of complex systems. revolutionizing drug design, climate modelling, battery chemistry, and many other vital processes. The iQPU chip, based on trapped ion technology, is used to generate and control the the qubits (Figure 4, Left). It is the core quantum processing unit, engineered for manufacturability and building large-scale quantum systems. The UQConnect (Figure 4, Right) is the modular interconnect architecture that links multiple iQPUs together, enabling scalable quantum computers through reliable, low-loss, chip to chip connectivity. Figure 4: Left - The iQPU High Precision Ion Trap Chip. Right - UQConnect Modular Interconnect Architecture Links Multiple iQPUs Together Universal Quantum According to Dr, Weidt, the company is able to engineer 100 qubit computers today, which is adequate to penetrate certain markets and applications. The goal is to realize computers with 1M qubits at operating temperatures of 70°K (rather than 4°K as other approaches do). Developing control schemes to levitate the trapped ions above the chip surface is key for low-loss interconnects. UQ was awarded a $80M, 4-year project in 2022 by the German Aerospace Center (DLR is its acronym in German), a 115 year pioneer in aerodynamics research. The goal of this project is to achieve a 100 qubit quantum computer as a deliverable (expected in 2026). UQ achieves this by first developing a basic iQPU module that has 10-25 qubits that perform all the essential quantum operations. These modules are then interconnected to create larger qubit systems. The UQConnect modular architecture is a key element to achieve this. This approach provides a scalable pathway to a million qubit computer, required to solve complex modeling problems in many fields, including computational fluid dynamics (of interest to DLR). Per Dr. Weidt, “Quantum computing has already proven the physics. The real challenge now is whether it can be engineered so systems can grow reliably and predictably. That is why Universal Quantum focuses on building technology that can be manufactured using established industrial processes and expanded through modular architectures. This is necessary to move quantum beyond demonstrations and become truly useful”. Quantum Flagship - Driving the Quantum Revolution in Europe Quantum Flagship (QF) is a EU-wide consortium that funds peer-reviewed projects in quantum technology within EU countries. It has a EU-funded budget of ~€1B to do this, based upon its Strategic Research Agenda, which is co-authored by the European Commission and QF. The goal is to consolidate and expand European scientific leadership and excellence in quantum technologies, to kick-start a competitive European industry, and to make Europe a dynamic and attractive region for innovative research, business and investments in this field. Figure 5: Quantum Flagship Showcased the Latest Advances in Europe’s Quantum Landscape at the March 2026 Mobile World Congress Raquel Puras and Quantum Flagship The European Quantum Industry Consortium (QuIC) is a non-profit industry association, founded in 2021, and dedicated to the growth of the European commercial quantum technology sector. It provides coordination and support services to the QF. QuIC operates as a collaborative hub throughout Europe, bringing together hundreds of SMEs, large corporations, investors, and academic institutes, to build a strong, vibrant quantum ecosystem. It has ~200 members. QuIC and QF goals are similar to the QED-C (Quantum Economic Development Consortium) in the United States (this is a group of industry and academia members that is managed by the U.S. Department of Commerce). Cecile Perrault is the Vice President of International Corporate and Administration at QuIC (a volunteer position), and Head of Innovation and Partnerships at Alice and Bob, a quantum computing company based in Paris, France. QuIC’s role is to represent the voice of its industry members with the EU Commission, and lobby for funding for the needs of the quantum industry in the EU. According to Dr. Perrault, the EU has several dominant players in the quantum arena, in the U.K, France, Germany, Netherlands and Finland. It also has key suppliers for the semiconductor and quantum industry (ASML in the Netherlands for lithography equipment, Bluefors, a world-leading supplier of cryostats in Finland and STMicro of France, a dominant supplier of semiconductors for data centers, computing, optical sensing and consumer electrnics. It is also active in the EU quantum effort, partnering with French start-up Quobly to manufacture quantum processing units at scale, on its 28 nm line, using 300 mm silicon wafers). Europe’s Chip Act (equal funding from EU and EU member countries) aimed at semiconductor supply chain resilience is also critical for its quantum efforts. On the customer front, Denmark and Sweden have large pharmaceutical companies like Novo Nordisk and AstraZeneca who are potential users of quantum computers for drug discovery. Airbus is a pioneer in pushing for QCI (Quantum Communications Infrastructure). European banks and financial companies are pioneers in deployment of quantum encrypted fiber-optic communication networks. Given these strengths, Dr. Perrault believes that “Europe is positioned to lead the world in Quantum Technologies. The combination of world-class research, ambitious start-ups, and strong public investment, gives Europe a unique opportunity to build a sovereign and competitive quantum ecosystem". UKQuantum - The Voice of the UK Quantum Industry This is a 65-member, industry-funded organization, based in the U.K. It overlaps and works in concert with EU wide groups like QF and QuIC, with its members being eligible for EU research funding in quantum (EU members can also compete for U.K. government funding). The organization represents the the voice of its industry members to the U.K. Government’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), and and advises the government on policies to advance the UK quantum industry. It ties academic hubs doing quantum research together and promotes the benefits of quantum technologies across the U.K. economy. As discussed in some of the company examples above, the U.K. has certainly been a pioneer in the the quantum industry, creating unicorns like Quantinuum and Oxford Ionic, as well as start-ups like Universal Quantum. Jonathan Legh-Smith is Executive Director, UKQuantum. In this capacity, he coordinates the activities of 5 working groups - Policy & National Strategy, International Cooperation and Trade, Road-mapping and Market Use Cases, Standards Development and Skills Mapping. These groups represent stakeholder interests in all areas of quantum technology - sensing, computing and networking. After missing the AI, semiconductor, social media and smartphone booms, and faced with a struggling automotive sector, will quantum technology provide Europe with a new commercial edge? The examples above showcase its strengths and abilities in this emerging field. Exceptional universities, a skilled workforce, government support and industrial policies have resulted in creating successful companies and significant growth in private funding for quantum technologies. The question is whether Europe can continue to nurture these advantages into positions of leadership. It will be exciting to watch as this revolution evolves. Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions LOADING VIDEO PLAYER... FORBES’ FEATURED Video