France bets €500 million that quantum computing is the tech race Europe can finally win

This article was published on April 14, 2026 Europe has spent a decade watching American and Chinese companies capture every major technology wave, cloud, mobile, social, AI. Quantum computing may be the exception. A cluster of French startups, backed by €500 million in government funding and underpinned by some of the world’s strongest physics research, is positioning France as a serious contender in a race where legacy advantages count for remarkably little. At the centre of the French effort is Alice & Bob, a Paris-based startup whose “cat qubit” technology, named after Schrödinger’s thought experiment, takes a fundamentally different approach to the field’s central problem: errors. Quantum computers manipulate individual particles whose states are so fragile that any interaction with the outside world destroys the computation. Most approaches compensate with massive redundancy, using thousands of physical qubits to produce a single reliable “logical” qubit. Alice & Bob’s cat qubits are designed to autonomously correct certain errors at the hardware level, potentially reducing the number of physical qubits needed by orders of magnitude. “It’s not about being faster,” says co-fou