This year’s edition of the European Quantum Technologies Conference was held, fittingly, in Copenhagen — home of Niels Bohr, and the birthplace of quantum mechanics.

After a grand opening — dancers, dignitaries, and the king of Denmark with his royal entourage — the tone is set by David Dreyer, head of the University of Copenhagen. Quantum science, he says, thrives on patience and collaboration, yet it now finds itself in a race defined by speed and secrecy. Europe, and Denmark in particular, may have led the first, but risk falling behind in the second.

The mood oscillates between pride and apprehension. Everything about the setting — the immaculate production, the ministerial speeches, the talk of “ecosystems” and “sovereignty” — suggests confidence. Yet underneath runs a subtle anxiety, amplified by the fragile geopolitical backdrop. The sense that the science which once transcended borders is now being asked to serve them.

Several speakers invoke history, reaching back to the Solvay Conference — that mythical 1911 gathering where seventeen of twenty-five attendees later received the Nobel Prize. It’s a reminder of how concentrated brilliance once was, and how different the world has become: from a single room in Brussels to a thousand distributed consortia, each competing for the same elusive qubits. As Denmark’s minister for European affairs, Marie Bjerre, puts it bluntly: “We invent, others commercialise.”

Between the lines, the word defence keeps surfacing — rarely pronounced directly, but hovering in phrases like “strategic autonomy” and “dual-use potential.” A few presentations touch, almost gingerly, on quantum sensing for navigation and laser targeting, reminding the audience that the same technologies promising better climate models or medical imaging also redraw the map of warfare. 

Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, delivers a speech that encapsulates Europe’s uneasy balance between confidence and concern. She rejects the idea that Europe lags in technology — at least not in quantum — yet concedes that while the continent excels at public funding, it falters in venture capital. Her focus is on closing the “lab-to-fab” gap through the new Quantum Pilot Line, and she hints at what’s to come: a dual-use roadmap to be announced next week. It’s an address that frames quantum as both a source of pride and a test of Europe’s strategic maturity.

One speaker recalls how the world’s great physicists once flocked to the Niels Bohr Institute, drawn not only by intellect but by Danish hygge — the warmth, the openness, the ease of exchange. It’s offered as a kind of parable: that Europe’s competitive edge has never been aggression or scale, but trust. The question now is whether that same softness can survive the hardening pressures of geopolitics and markets.

Christina Egelund, Denmark’s Minister for Higher Education and Science, takes up the theme with a sharper edge. “Control means sovereignty,” she says — and with that, defines the central paradox of the moment: how to remain an open, collaborative partner while still protecting what’s one’s own.

Quantum, she continues, is fast becoming critical infrastructure — too important to be left entirely to market forces or foreign supply chains. But Denmark’s strength, she argues, lies not merely in the scale of its investments, but in the way it is organised: small, cohesive, and guided by a shared ethic of trust and responsibility. Our labs are the frontline now, she says.

The plenary on Advancing Scientific Excellence in Quantum Across Europe strikes a more procedural note. Speakers emphasise the need to align national strategies with the coming EU Quantum Act, to scale from fragmentation to unity, and to secure the entire quantum value chain. Europe, we’re told, already leads in the number of startups, yet still struggles with access to finance and a splintered market. Beneath the policy language runs a quiet defensiveness — that the mere act of respecting academic freedom has become a strategic advantage (“it’s absurd to have to say it, but it’s true”). The ministers insist on distinguishing sovereignty from self-sufficiency: the former desirable, the latter a trap. “Of course I’m lobbying for Denmark,” Egelund says, “but Danes must also understand it’s a win if a quantum computer is built anywhere in Europe.”

Morten Bødskov, Denmark’s Minister for Industry, Business and Financial Affairs, brings the discussion back to hard economics. While China and the United States pour vast sums into high-tech, Europe, he says, continues to channel most of its resources into middle tech. The recent Draghi report, he adds, makes plain that Europe doesn’t just face an opportunity — it faces a problem. To narrow the gap, he announces a new Quantum Fund of one billion Danish kroner, intended not only to finance research but to draw in more risk-willing private capital.

Professor Peter Lodahl, Chief Quantum Officer at Sparrow Quantum, cuts through the policy speak with a blunt reminder: it’s not enough to be the best in Denmark, or even in Europe — you have to be the best in the world. Curiosity alone won’t build a company, he says. “I used to be one of those scientists — we really need to get out of our labs.” A line that lands somewhere between confession and challenge.

In one of the final sessions, professor Jørgen Ellegaard Andersen takes the stage on one of the smaller side-events. It’s the third time I see him and he knocks my socks off every time. I’m branching off into a separate post to argue for why. (there’s also a bonus spin-out post here, reflecting on nordic sibling rivalry).

Day one concludes with a lavish dinner at a glossy venue, complete with an open bar and a cabaret-style show. If a century has passed since the quantum revolution began, you wouldn’t have known it that evening — it felt like being back in the roaring twenties. For all its exuberance, though, the highlight came when an unlikely figure took the stage: the archivist from the Niels Bohr Institute, who treated us to a charming slideshow from the institute’s golden days. There was Werner, skiing through the garden; Lise, Albert and Erwin fooling around with the institute’s dachshund. Quite lovely.

As conferences go, this one turns out to be the kind where you get two for the price of one. The first day was all royal pomp and high-profile policymakers, flanked by heavily armed police. I’ve never been to the World Economic Forum in Davos, but I imagine the atmosphere is much the same — high-level people effusively agreeing with one another, thanks largely to the fact that they remain high-level.

Day two was very different.

The problem with chronicling the second day of the conference is that there was simply too much good stuff going on. I’ve got pages and pages of scribbles — much of it recording smart things said by very clever people, most of it, regrettably, jumbled and hence tricky to properly attribute. Worse still, many of the most rewarding insights came from entirely undocumented conversations over coffee.

Then there’s the peculiar phenomenon that seems endemic to this business we call quantum: when people say things that sound really profound and essential to grasp, they sometimes sail a good mile over your head. A single example, just to give a flavour: one presenter spoke about the asymmetry between the narrow input bandwidth of today’s machines and their firehose-like output, suggesting that this bottleneck might, in theory, be turned into an advantage. I sat up in my chair when I heard that. But when I approached him backstage to ask a follow-up question, I found myself quite sure that what he was saying was important — and equally sure that the essential insight kept eluding me.

One of the main events of the second day, in my book was Finish scale-up phenomenon IQM. Born out of Aalto University and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in 2018, the company has since become Europe’s first quantum unicorn — proof that deep tech can, occasionally, break through the continent’s funding ceiling. Its co-founder, Professor Mikko Möttönen, gave a talk that was as unpretentious as it was revealing — very Finnish in its understatement and pragmatism.

He contrasted the short-term horizon of corporate R&D — a quarter, maybe a year — with the university’s duty to think in decades. His own horizon now is autonomous quantum processing units (AQPUs): systems so tightly integrated that their bill of materials could fall by an order of magnitude, qubit for qubit.

He also made a wry point about investors’ attitudes toward university-owned IP. Having the university as a shareholder is “delicious,” he said — founders keep more equity — but “you also have to trust that the IP is kosher,” since the institution isn’t standing behind it. (Q Mill, his second startup, builds on Möttönen’s own IP.)

Asked what it takes to attract serious capital, he didn’t hesitate: “Great founders aren’t enough. You need to be able to name your first five hires.” Talent, he reminded us, remains the ultimate bottleneck — a refrain echoed by nearly every speaker.

From there, the programme shifted from hardware and investment to something more applied. The plenary on Near-Term Applications of Quantum Technologies in Life Science and Medtech gathered a panel where computation, sensing, and biology shared the same stage.

Much of the discussion revolved around the marriage between AI and quantum. Quantum systems, especially in sensing, generate torrents of data — the real opportunity, several panellists suggested, is in letting AI interpret those floods. (Perhaps that’s what that obscure comment about input–output asymmetry was pointing to…)

Europe’s weakness, inevitably, came up: fragmentation. “We can’t do everything,” one speaker said. “We have to focus — to figure out the European brand.” Yet there was optimism too. Several reminded the audience how strong Europe remains at the earliest stages of innovation, thanks in part to the EIC’s support. The session closed with a quickfire question: would the first quantum unicorn in life sciences be European? All three panellists said yes.

Cécile Perrault, vice-president of the European Quantum Industry Consortium (QuIC), brought her usual mix of warmth and precision. I’ve heard her before and always find her presence disarmingly genuine — humble, yet razor-sharp.

Her message was both reassuring and sobering. On paper, Europe’s quantum ecosystem looks remarkably strong: more than 400 companies, between a third and a quarter of the global total, and a public investment of around €7.5 billion — one of the largest state-funded pushes anywhere. Venture funding has followed suit: Multiverse has just raised €189 million, Alice & Bob €100 million, and IQM €320 million. But the real challenge, she argued, isn’t creation — it’s scale. “We’re creating new startups faster than we can grow them, which means we’re just building somebody else’s next acquisition.” The forthcoming Quantum Act, she suggested, could help shift that dynamic by creating a genuine home market for European quantum technologies.

QuIC itself strikes me as unusually agile for a Brussels-based consortium — operating in sprints, lobbying hard to steer the Quantum Act in the right direction. Yet even that agility can’t offset structural frictions. Energy costs in Europe remain roughly 70 percent higher than in the US. “We need to turn that constraint into an advantage,” she said, drawing a parallel to how DeepSeek positions itself against OpenAI.

Talent, too, is a recurring concern. Around 60 percent of QuIC’s members cite it as the main bottleneck, and more and more European graduates are heading abroad. Still, Perrault radiated optimism. If the last decade was about proving the science, she said, this one will be about scaling the companies.

The following panel — The Emerging Quantum Industry — brought a harder edge. On stage were Jan Goetz of IQM, Ilyas Khan of Quantinuum and Bob Sorensen from Hyperion Research.

The first Cray supercomputers, someone noted, were shipped without an operating system. That’s roughly where we are now with quantum computers — astonishing machines, but still in need of a usable layer on top. “It’s time to reclaim them from the physicists”.

Speaking of supercomputers, Sorenson pointed out that the companies already relying on high-performance computing to gain a competitive edge were also the first to see where quantum might fit. The earliest signs of pull from such users appeared six or seven years ago.

Jan Goetz made the case that as data centres balloon to the scale of small cities energy becomes the hard constraint. In that context, quantum’s potential energy efficiency could become a decisive selling point.

There was a certain amount of nervousness when talking about the possibly over-heating investment climate. “All it takes is one or two down-rounds,” someone said, “and the whole investment mood could freeze.” Quantinuum alone, Khan acknowledged, has raised and burned through about €4 billion — a number he mentioned not boastfully, but as a reminder that scaling truly matters now, going on to say that “the only roadmaps that can be trusted, are the ones with absolute proof points.” The next two or three years, he said, are already spoken for — execution now is everything.

The final session of the day shifted the focus from markets to mission. The conversation circled around how Europe might turn its scientific edge into lasting advantage — and how to avoid repeating the semiconductor story, when we owned both the science and the early industry, only to lose them both.

“Somebody has to be strategic,” someone said. It would’ve been funny if it hadn’t captured the entire European predicament in one line. Everyone agrees on the need for focus; no one quite knows how to achieve it.

Another tension ran through the discussion: deregulation versus protection. Let go too soon and the most promising companies will head abroad in search of funding; hold on too tightly and you stifle their growth. It’s politics, I suppose — even if it dresses itself up as innovation policy.

If I had to distil this tangle of impressions into one thought, it would be this: quantum is fast becoming an industry, and Europe stands to gain — yet the real task now is not to perfect the machines, but to match their coherence.