By Dominique Patton
PARIS, May 22 (Reuters) – French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday that the government will invest an additional €1 billion ($1.16 billion) in its quantum strategy and €550 million to support the microelectronics sector, as global powers race to be first to leverage emerging technology.
“I’ll say it out loud. We have the means to be the winners of this race,” Macron said while announcing the funding.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump’s administration unveiled plans to take $2 billion in equity stakes across nine quantum-computing companies to secure U.S. leadership in the technology that is set to become the next frontier after AI.
• Technological breakthroughs have deepened investor interest in quantum computing’s potential to speed up tasks from drug discovery to financial modelling and cryptography.
• A “massive” increase in investment has been driven by the realisation of the growing economic importance of computing infrastructure, Theau Peronnin, CEO of Paris-headquartered quantum computing firm Alice & Bob, told Reuters.
• Peronnin said public funding of such strategic areas as quantum computing forced companies to deliver and helped “create champions.”
• The company is among those to receive support from the new French funding, and said on Friday it has also won funding from Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures to develop hardware to make quantum computing less error-prone.
• The company is participating in France’s PROQCIMA programme led by the Ministry of the Armed Forces, which aims to have two French-designed prototypes of universal quantum computers ready for industrialisation by 2032.
($1 = 0.8618 euros)
(Reporting by Dominique Patton; additional reporting by Michel Rose and Inti Landauro; Editing by Sonali Paul, Jan Harvey and Tomasz Janowski)
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