France adds €1bn to its quantum push as the US and Europe race to dominate a technology that could reshape computing, defence and drug discovery.

France has announced an additional €1bn investment into its quantum strategy, on top of the €2.3bn the country had already committed to quantum research since 2021, bringing its total public commitment in the field to €3.3bn.

“The speed of our competitors requires that we shift into a higher gear” and “change the scale” of investment, French president Emmanuel Macron said during a visit to a supercomputing centre in Bruyères-le-Châtel, south of Paris, according to AFP.

“In all of these questions, there’s a battle over sovereignty that is being fought and must absolutely be won … Technological dependencies will more and more become industrial and strategic dependencies,” he added. “I’ll say it out loud. We have the means to be the winners of this race.”

Macron also announced a further €550m in state funding for semiconductors as part of a European programme, on top of existing commitments of €5.5bn since 2022.

France’s quantum push is not new. In January 2021, Macron announced a five-year investment plan worth €1.8bn in quantum technologies, pledging to put France among “the world’s top three” in the field, increasing public investment from €60m to €200m a year.

The strategy has focused on building a robust domestic ecosystem spanning research, industry and defence, including a ministry of the armed forces programme that aims to have two French-designed prototype universal quantum computers ready for industrialisation by 2032.

Also on Friday, French quantum start-up Alice & Bob announced that NVentures, Nvidia’s venture capital arm, has joined its cap table in an extension of its €100m Series B round. The original round closed in January 2025, led by Future French Champions, AXA Venture Partners and Bpifrance.

The Paris-based company specialises in cat-qubit architecture and has worked closely with Nvidia since 2024 on integrating its technology with Nvidia’s hybrid quantum-classical computing ecosystem, including CUDA-Q and NVQLink.

“NVentures’ investment marks a new phase in that relationship and reinforces our common view that the future of quantum will be hybrid, combining quantum and classical computing to solve real-world problems,” said Théau Peronnin, Alice & Bob’s CEO.

This came a day after the US department of commerce proposed $2bn in federal incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act for nine quantum companies, as SiliconRepublic.com reported this morning. IBM is the biggest beneficiary at $1bn, which it will match with $1bn of its own to establish Anderon, the first pure-play US quantum chip foundry. The remaining $1bn is split across GlobalFoundries, D-Wave, Rigetti, Infleqtion, Atom Computing, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum and Diraq, with the US government taking a minority stake in each.

Additional reporting by Ann O’Dea. 

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