France is wagering €500 million that quantum computing is the technological competition Europe can ultimately triumph in.

      For the past ten years, Europe has observed as American and Chinese firms have monopolized significant technological advancements in areas such as the cloud, mobile, social media, and AI. Quantum computing stands as a potential exception. A group of French startups, supported by €500 million in government funding and bolstered by some of the world’s leading physics research, is positioning France as a serious competitor in a field where existing advantages are not as impactful.

      Central to the French initiative is Alice & Bob, a Paris-based startup that employs a unique “cat qubit” technology, inspired by Schrödinger’s thought experiment, which approaches a key issue in quantum computing: errors. Quantum computers manage individual particles whose states are so delicate that any external interaction can disrupt the computation. Most methods counter this challenge with extensive redundancy, utilizing thousands of physical qubits to create a single reliable “logical” qubit. In contrast, Alice & Bob’s cat qubits are engineered to autonomously correct certain errors at the hardware level, which could significantly decrease the number of physical qubits required.

      “It’s not about being faster,” states co-founder and CEO Théau Peronnin, who established the company in 2020 with Raphaël Lescanne. “It’s about being dramatically faster to redefine the limits of what’s possible.” The firm secured €100 million in a Series B funding round in January 2025, led by Future French Champions, AXA Venture Partners, and Bpifrance, bringing total funding to €130 million. It is now channeling $50 million into a new laboratory north of Paris, featuring a clean room for in-house chip production and a test facility for increasingly larger machines.

      Five companies, five qubit architectures

      Alice & Bob is not working alone. France’s PROQCIMA program, a government initiative aiming to develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer demonstrating 128 logical qubits by 2030 and a 2,048-logical-qubit commercial system by 2035, has chosen five companies for its initial €500 million phase: Alice & Bob (cat qubits), Pasqal (neutral atoms), Quandela (photonics), Quobly (silicon spin), and C12 Quantum Electronics (carbon nanotubes). The program is structured as a competition; after four years, the three most promising techniques will advance, and after eight years, only two will remain.

      This diversity serves as a strategic advantage. Instead of focusing on a single qubit architecture—as the U.S. has effectively done with superconducting circuits—France is fostering multiple approaches, each with unique benefits. Pasqal, which plans to go public with an estimated $2 billion valuation, already has neutral-atom quantum computers in high-performance computing facilities across Europe. Quobly achieved a significant milestone in December 2025 when its isotopically enriched silicon wafers were incorporated into STMicroelectronics’ 300mm production line in Crolles, marking its first integration into a high-volume commercial semiconductor fabrication facility. Quandela has partnered with OVHcloud to provide its processors through sovereign cloud infrastructure by mid-2026.

      Olivier Ezratty, an academic whose comprehensive 1,500-page work “Understanding Quantum Technologies” serves as a standard reference, highlights that the French companies share a crucial advantage: lower machine and energy costs compared to their American counterparts. In a sector characterized by high power demands driven by cryogenic cooling and error correction, this advantage may be more significant than just the number of qubits.

      The competitive landscape

      France is not the only European nation pursuing quantum technology. Finland’s IQM announced in February its intention to become the first publicly traded European quantum company through a $1.8 billion SPAC merger, with a lead listing on the NYSE and a potential dual listing in Helsinki. IQM has secured over $600 million in total funding and already operates superconducting quantum computers. The UK is represented by Oxford Quantum Circuits and Riverlane, the latter focusing on quantum operating systems.

      Leading American companies remain formidable competitors. Google, which acquired the cat-qubit-adjacent startup Atlantic Quantum in October 2025, along with IBM and a host of well-funded rivals, possess greater financial resources and larger engineering teams. However, Peronnin contends that the competitive field is more even than it seems. “Ultimately, it’s a mathematical challenge,” he asserts. “There’s no unfair advantage from legacy classical computing technologies, so there’s no reason to hold back.”

      The talent pool in physics reinforces his optimism. France has produced three Nobel Prize winners in recent years: Serge Haroche (2012) for quantum optics, Alain Aspect (2022) for experiments in quantum entanglement, and Albert Fert (2007) for spintronics, all from prestigious institutions like École Polytechnique and École Normale Supérieure that contribute directly to the nation’s quantum ecosystem. The founders of Alice & Bob also come from