The AI experience is instructive. Europe’s difficulty was never a shortage of ideas, but a lack of the manufacturing base, early customers, growth capital and coordination needed to build companies of global scale. In quantum, Europe does not need to create champions. It needs to keep the ones it already has, and to build an industrial ecosystem around them deep enough to anchor them here.

 

Why Europe can win

Europe’s strength begins with its foundations. Public investment in quantum technologies across the European Union has reached roughly $10 billion, second only to China and ahead of the United States. McKinsey estimates that Europe accounts for roughly 44% of global quantum patents, while the European Investment Bank notes that Europe supplies more than half of several critical quantum hardware components.

Europe also leads in putting quantum computers to work. It hosts 21 national quantum installations in high-performance computing centers, around two-thirds of the global total, compared with two in the United States. Integrating quantum processors into existing supercomputing infrastructure is a distinctly European model, and because quantum, AI and high-performance computing are increasingly used together, it is a genuine strategic asset.

At IQM, we saw this from inside. Since spinning out of Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in 2018, we have sold more on-premises quantum computers globally than any other manufacturer. In July, we became the first European quantum computing company to go public, listing on the Nasdaq Stock Market in the United States and in Helsinki.

 

Why Europe wants to win

The prize is considerably larger than market share. Working in tandem with classical supercomputers, quantum computers can address classes of problems that remain intractable for conventional machines, from molecular simulation for medical research and drug discovery to the design of new materials, the optimization of logistics networks and the modeling of financial risk.

By 2030, the ambition should be fault-tolerant quantum computers accessible not only to researchers but to businesses and public institutions across the European economy. Embedding quantum in Europe’s supercomputing centers and in the next phases of its AI factories and gigafactories is the most direct route to that kind of industrial uptake.

There is also a question of economic security. Europe’s reliance on foreign chips and cloud services already constitutes a strategic exposure, and quantum is a dual-use technology with implications for secure communications and critical infrastructure. Sovereignty here is not protectionism but the capacity to choose partners rather than depend on them, and its surest foundation is a European quantum industry with superior products that win business anywhere in the world.

 

How Europe can win

The EU Quantum Act is the moment to connect strengths that are distributed across the continent, from Finland and Germany to the Netherlands and Denmark. According to the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), nearly 23% of EU quantum funding is spread across 34 smaller clusters that lack commercial density, compared with 2% in the United States and 1% in China. By pooling demand, sharing infrastructure and aligning national strategies, the Act gives Europe the opportunity to enter the next global technology race together. Five measures would give it the industrial weight it needs.

1. Build an industrial factory
   Quantum chips are the heartbeat of a quantum computer, and unlike software, they cannot scale without manufacturing capacity. The European Chips Act has strengthened research capacity through pilot lines, but Europe still lacks industrial-scale fabrication for quantum chips, and many companies have limited access to prototyping at scale.The Quantum Act should close that gap with a clear commitment to industrial-grade quantum chip fabrication in Europe, operational by the 2030s and comparable to the quantum foundry capacity IBM and GlobalFoundries are now building in the United States with support from the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. Rather than a single giant factory, a hybrid model would combine shared infrastructure, such as commercial packaging foundries, with dedicated first-of-a-kind facilities for qubit-chip production, accessible to the whole European ecosystem.
2. Turn public buyers into co-developers
   Through the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC), Europe has already begun acting as an early customer for quantum computing.Structured around co-development, public procurement can build intellectual property, industrial capability and talent rather than simply purchase technology.Our partnerships with VTT in Finland and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Germany show how this works in practice, with each new generation of systems building skills and operational know-how on both sides.The Quantum Act could scale this model through a procurement mechanism inspired by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), funding the co-development of world-class systems through milestone-based public contracts rather than research grants alone. Member States could pool demand, as they have done for supercomputing through EuroHPC, and coordinated European demand should extend beyond space and defense applications to quantum computing.

   The EU’s planned Quantum Grand Challenges, including one on fault-tolerant quantum computing, could become Europe’s answer to the U.S. Quantum Benchmarking Initiative. Run by DARPA, the U.S. program committed up to $300 million in October to a single company to validate its path to a utility-scale, fault-tolerant machine. If Europe wants fault-tolerant quantum computing on a comparable timeline, the EU’s Grand Challenges will need comparable resources and milestone-based, procurement-style funding, not a fraction of them.

3. Anchor growth capital in Europe
   The growth stage is where Europe’s ecosystem is thinnest. Through 2024, EU companies captured just over 12% of disclosed global quantum funding, while U.S. companies captured 44%. When early investors exit, the buyers are mostly from outside Europe. Without a large European institutional investor able to step in, ownership of strategic companies can move abroad as they become most valuable, taking their intellectual property and decision-making with them. As Europe moves to keep strategic quantum capabilities under European control, that ownership will matter more, not less, and the capital needs to be there to back it.A strengthened, EU-backed Scale-up Europe Fund could act as that anchor, provided it can take part in mixed primary and secondary rounds. This is not a call for subsidy, and global capital remains welcome. The aim is for European investors and sovereign capital to retain stakes for longer in the companies they helped scale.
4. Strengthen quantum within the EU’s Chips Act 2.0
   The EU’s Chips Act 2.0 should be the instrument that delivers the Quantum Act’s industrial ambition. As proposed, Chips Act 2.0 retains quantum pilot lines but offers quantum fabrication no route to strategic-project status. Including quantum chips in its first-of-a-kind criteria would make dedicated quantum fabrication facilities eligible for state aid as manufacturing processes mature. The same framework should support the enabling supply chain, from cryogenics and control electronics to specialized materials, where Europe can build the kind of hard-to-replicate advantage it already holds in lithography through ASML.
5. Move at the speed of business
   Speed matters as much as scale. Companies make investment decisions on commercial timelines, and when a new production site is ready to be built, the region that approves support first usually wins it. Singapore approves comparable packages in four to six months. In Europe, state aid approval for a first-of-a-kind facility can take a year or more, and Member States themselves warn that delays risk leaving technology obsolete before projects begin. The Quantum Act should give strategic quantum projects a single window and a fixed decision deadline, with streamlined permitting for critical facilities.

 

Keep Europe’s champions

Europe has already built the science, the talent and the first generation of quantum companies. The AI era showed what happens when research leadership is not matched by industrial ambition. This time, Europe’s task is to keep its champions and turn that leadership into industries, jobs and breakthroughs that improve people’s lives. With an ambitious Quantum Act, Europe can take that chance.