EuroHPC Launches 6 Quantum Calls with €119M in Funding

It's part of the EU's strategy to catch up by investing in future technology instead of building out present capacity.

I think it's a mistaken strategy but it's hard to suggest anything better when you look at the measly amounts they're investing that would get them very little with existing technology. So, they're forced to gamble on vaporwave tech.

Edit: I'm specifically talking about their semiconductor and computing strategy.

> Why pile so much public money into quantum computing where there are (afaik) barely any useful algorithms, while Europe could instead invest in catching up on GPU infrastructure...

Because if you do not become competitive on the frontier you are doomed to perpetually play a game of catch-up. This is what happened to the EU with battery technology, renewable technology, AI, digital services, and semiconductors.

GPUs require sub-7nm design, fabrication, and packaging - all of which is nonexistent in Europe today, and would take 10-20 years at which point the EU-27 would have fallen behind the frontier again.

Europe cannot be competitive in bleeding edge and legacy packaging in 2026-36 given how heavily subsidized and tightly integrated the Asian and American cluster is (eg. I can get 0-1% interest rate loan terms with tax holidays and subsidizes in the 9 figure range in much of Asia and the US). Europe CAN reinvest in 2D packaging, materials, and metrology (which is critical for quantum).

Europe cannot be competitive in bleeding edge fabrication in 2026-36 given how heavily subsidized and tightly integrated the Asian and American cluster is (eg. I can get 0-1% interest rate loan terms with tax holidays and subsidizes in the 9 figure range in much of Asia and the US). Europe CAN be competitive in legacy (28nm and above), power, and compound semiconductor fabrication (this also had a downstream impact on quantum).

Europe cannot be competitive in chip design in 2026-36 given how heavily subsidized and tightly integrated the Asian and American cluster is. It CAN work on building the next generation of tooling needed to design quantum circuits and conduct metrology.

Quantum applications of Sensing, Optics, Communication, Key Distribution, Computing, Packaging, and Hardware Design are all greenfield segments that everyone is at a roughly equal starting point at. All these technologies have directly relevant applications in telecommunications, defense, semiconductor packaging, and computing.

And this is what can help some EU states regain relevance in the competitive frontier. There's a reason France has been working heavily on this for a decade.

GPUs are in a weird bubble captured by weird finance tricks in the private sector. They put money into that, taxpayers are going to freak out.

If they can make progress on QOA and HHL algos, that has value.

But the main thing they're trying to avoid - and this can't be understated - is dependency on US tech firms when quantum gets good enough to be practical for those sorts of problems.

Since WW2, Europe has happily been a consumer of US produced tech. The last 10 years has caused a revisiting of that view. It's an exercise for the reader to figure out the factors leading to that, and whether they think it's sensible or not.

Because lots of senior researchers who call the shots are somehow invested in QC.

Catching up in GPU infrastructure in what way? It is not reasonable to expect to catch up on full GPU design to fabrication. If you mean datacenters, I believe they are being built wherever feasible, nordic regions and then spain/portugal.

Quantum today is actually in a good place investment wise because two fields have matured enough that there is a defense usecase to rally funding around - communication and sensing.

Computing is less than 1-3rd of the story. We could end up failing to make a fault tolerant computer and be totally fine and happy with the other benefits.

The long term hope that we throw out there is that these two usecases subsidise the development of quantum computers in some way, and _that_ helps take it over the line. But that's just a bonus.

Quantum computing is a far less mature technology than GPUs, and investments in it will yield a lot of interesting research that nobody else would be willing to pay for. The bet is that solving the problems one needs to solve to make advancements towards practical quantum computing will also solve other problems in other fields that might be much closer to a commercial application.