Oct. 27, 2025 –
By Anne-Françoise Pelé, EETimes Europe (October 24, 2025)
Europe’s quantum ambition depends on aligning public vision with private resolve.
At the recent Q2B 2025 conference in Paris, several voices called for Europe to accelerate private investment in quantum technologies, lest it fall behind its global competitors.
On July 2, the European Commission unveiled a formal strategy for positioning Europe as a global leader in quantum by 2030. The European Quantum Strategy acknowledges the continent’s strengths—academic excellence, talent density, and early-stage entrepreneurship—but also highlights Europe’s persistent funding imbalance, noting that “while pre-seed and seed-stage funding is widely available from public sources, Europe attracts only 5% of the global private quantum funding, compared to over 50% captured by the U.S.” The document warns that this gap is “particularly pronounced at later stages of development,” creating a risk that EU startups “could be acquired by non-European investors,” with attendant “potential losses in IP, critical technologies, technological sovereignty, and talent.”