When the topic comes up at Aricoma, one name is impossible to overlook: Ivan Doboš. As the person responsible for tracking developments in quantum technologies and figuring out how to deploy them in real business environments, he is the company's central hub for everything related to the subject. And given how fast things are moving, it is time to take stock of where we stand today and where it is all heading.
“UNESCO has declared 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, and that is no coincidence. At the same time, the European Union approved its European quantum strategy on July 3rd, with the goal of making Europe a world leader in this field by 2030. We have our work cut out for us, that is true, but what matters is that we have set ourselves this goal,” says Doboš, pointing to the broader context. Those grand ambitions are, in part, a response to Europe's own embarrassment. Having fallen behind in chip development and artificial intelligence, the continent cannot afford to let another opportunity slip by.
“In quantum technologies, now is exactly the right time to push forward. We are all still on the same starting line. But we are already moving from the 'one day' phase to the 'day one' phase,” states Doboš, conjuring the image of Formula One cars revving their engines at the start, waiting for the chequered flag to drop. With one key difference: no one is going to drop it. The race has already begun.
The European Quantum Strategy
The EU's quantum strategy covers five areas: research and development, quantum infrastructure, quantum ecosystem, space, civil and military technologies, and quantum skills. Each of these could fill hours of discussion, but let us focus on the most essential points.
“The good news is that Europe has a very strong scientific foundation, and a number of startups are emerging. Where things are weaker is the enthusiasm of companies to build quantum infrastructure. The EU is investing heavily, but private investment is nowhere near the levels seen in the US or Asia,” says Doboš. This plays out in practice in telling ways: IQM, the company that delivered the first quantum computer to the national supercomputing centre in Ostrava just a few weeks ago, is Finnish by origin, yet its most recent capital investment came from the United States.
Speaking of supercomputing centres, that brings us to the infrastructure being gradually built across Europe. Much of the funding flows through the Quantum Flagship and EuroHPC project schemes, which finance and deploy technologies primarily at supercomputing centres. The EuroQCI project, meanwhile, aims to build a pan-European network for secure quantum communication.
How many qubits are enough qubits?
So much for the public sector side of things. Another strong direction is being driven by companies already running their first calculations on machines with several dozen qubits. Firms like Airbus, Boeing, and various carmakers are using them to run initial simulations of real-world phenomena. “At the moment, this is applied research in practice, and everyone is learning a great deal from it. We are still living in what is known as the NISQ era, Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum, where the results we get are affected by noise. That means you cannot just send a task to the computer once. You have to send it multiple times and then statistically evaluate the outputs on a separate, less advanced machine,” explains Ivan Doboš.
Current results are being produced by machines in the range of several dozen to several hundred qubits. The Ostrava machine, for instance, has 24 qubits. 50-qubit machines are now in common commercial use, and machines of more than 100 qubits are used for scientific purposes. CTU has launched a Quantum Innovation Centre and, together with the Czech Academy of Sciences and seven partner universities, has purchased cloud access to IBM's 127-qubit infrastructure for research purposes. And IQM, the company mentioned earlier, expects to be able to produce a 1,000-qubit machine by 2027.
Quantum era in 3, 2, 1…
But back to the above-mentioned noise and error rate. The same problem once plagued the computers we use without a second thought today, and hardware has been able to detect and correct it for several decades. In quantum computers, that work is now underway. “Most predictions say we will manage to solve the error correction problem by 2028 or 2029. We could therefore start deploying quantum technologies at scale sometime around 2030,” says Ivan Doboš, pointing to a very near future and describing how the new era will give rise to new giants.
At the moment, around 90 companies worldwide are working on quantum computer development. Each is taking a different approach, working with different particles and quantum phenomena, and it is still unclear which direction will ultimately prevail. “We are furthest along in the area of superconductors, a field that was recognised this year with the Nobel Prize in Physics. The drawback, however, is that superconductors only work well at very low temperatures, around 10 millikelvin, which is close to absolute zero, -273.15 degrees Celsius,” Doboš notes, suggesting that while this path is promising, it is far from practical. It is therefore quite possible that the race will ultimately be won by someone taking an entirely different approach.
What is certain is that the future is already here. Quantum technologies bring with them a host of new challenges, among them the breaking of currently used encryption standards and the urgent need to develop new, more secure ones, and they are set to reshuffle the cards in the geopolitical contest. The European Union has responded by creating a roadmap for the transition to post-quantum cryptography, giving member states guidance on how to build the frameworks needed to move from existing encryption to the new generation. By 2030, for instance, all critical systems will be required to have made the switch to post-quantum cryptography.
And that connects to another major task. Europe and the world at large now face the need to train a new generation of computer scientists who will carry the entire technological landscape into this new world and be capable of devising new solutions and developing new software within it. Hardware development and application building will also undergo a fundamental paradigm shift.