As I stepped into the grand auditorium at Chalmers for the opening of IQT Nordics—Sweden’s biggest quantum tech conference to date—I was bracing for overload. But when the lights dimmed, I relaxed. Maybe it was the acoustics. Maybe it was the promise of seeing Europe’s quantum ambitions laid bare. Either way, I opened my laptop and started typing.
I didn’t know yet that I wouldn’t make it to Day 2—not with my field notes, anyway. Something happened at the very end of Day 1 that shifted my focus entirely. A last-minute talk by QPuropse changed the tone so completely it made my stream-of-consciousness jottings feel beside the point. (Those thoughts turned instead into a separate piece: Q Day Came Quietly.)
But the notes below still capture something: not just a record of who said what, but the ambient mood of the European quantum ecosystem right now. Half chorus, half murmuration. So here they are—edited lightly, but not polished beyond recognition.
A Different Kind of Urgency
Mikael Rönnholm from Volvo set the tone early: “We’re moving into a phase where we have to forget what we learned in business school.” In a world of short product cycles and permanent instability, quantum computing is no longer a moonshot—it’s one of five strategic bets. But success won’t come from tech scouting alone. “You have to get the budget owners to sing the quantum song with you.”
Muhammad Asad Ullah from Ericsson framed the challenge differently. For them, it’s not about standalone quantum advantage. It’s about system integration into 6G-scale cyber-physical systems. “We’re not interested in quantum advantage as a stand-alone thing,” he said. “The question is where quantum fits.”
And then there was this reminder from the panel floor: “Fear usually trumps opportunity. That’s why we start with cybersecurity.”
Translators Wanted
If there was a central theme across the day, it was this: we don’t just need physicists—we need translators.
One speaker put it bluntly: “Physicists need to stop digging further into their niched hole. The hole needs to get wider, so civilians can fall into it.”
Hardware, in this framing, is the wrong obsession. “As exciting as it is to understand a Josephson junction in detail, it’s not something application experts should care about.” What we need are application-specific layers that abstract away the physics—just like very few programmers today need to understand FPGAs.
“The wow is in the how.”
Someone sketched a pyramid. An inverted one, in fact: all the effort is currently at the bottom—control, fabrication, coherence. But most of the future value will come from higher up the stack.
The Nordic countries, someone noted, would be the world’s eleventh-largest economy if combined. In quantum? Possibly higher. But potential only matters if it’s coordinated. A pan-Nordic approach could be formidable—but only if we avoid the trap of “islands of excellence” disconnected by institutional silos.
Building While Flying
Jonathan Kutchinsky from Quantum Machines described their work building a hybrid, parameterised framework for quantum control, including Qua—an open-source layer that brings pseudo-code-like flexibility to running quantum experiments. “Memory-based systems don’t scale,” he said. “We’re trying to move the industry forward.”
Pekka Pursula from VTT made the case for quantum-HPC integration as the real frontier. His vision? LUMI-scale classical compute meshed with quantum nodes and open software stacks like MQSS.
He also talked infrastructure: cleanroom facilities, fabrication standardisation, and the shift from RF-based interconnects to fibre optics. And cooling: “We need to move to solid state.”
Arsalan Pourkabirian of Low Noise Factory brought a different angle: heritage from space. His startup began in radio astronomy and now builds microwave amplifiers used both in quantum computers and on probes headed for Jupiter. The space legacy taught them to optimise for quality, size, and power consumption. (They’ve also been profitable since day one.)
Lisa Rooth of SCALINQ shared a similar story. Another quantum hardware startup, also profitable from day one, and navigating the Wild West of a field with no standards yet in place. “Coming from space,” someone said, “you feel the lack of industry standards here immediately.”
Europe’s Moment?
A panel moderated by Samira Nik of the EIC wrestled with a familiar tension: Europe is rich in science, but weak in coordination. Finland’s InstituteQ was praised as a model. But the continent still lacks the investor tempo and DARPA-style ambition that has propelled U.S. players like PsiQuantum.
“Everyone who’s made it big in the U.S. has had DARPA behind them,” someone said. “We shouldn’t expect that kind of muscle from the EIC.”
There were calls for better talent pipelines, more support for entrepreneurial operators, and a culture that celebrates exits and reinvestment. “It’s okay to be successful.”
And then came Harry Buhrman, from Quantinuum, with a beautifully sideways metaphor:
The accidental birth of microbiology didn’t come from solving industrial problems. It came from building the microscope. Discovery came before application.
Quantum computing, he argued, is still in its microscope phase. The problems it will solve—”queasy” problems, as he called them, that are hard for classical machines and easy for quantum ones—are only just now coming into view.
And just as that thought was landing, came the thing that changed everything.
Postscript : QPuropse Breaks the Frame
At the very end of Day 1, a late-stage presentation from QPuropse caught everyone off guard. They claimed to have demonstrated an exponential speedup of Monte Carlo simulations using Gaussian Boson Sampling.
It wasn’t just that the QPuropse claim was bold—it was that it didn’t belong to the same rhythm. Where the rest of the day had been about coordination, translation, and momentum-building, this felt like a rupture. A different kind of event. That’s why I stopped writing in bullet points and started searching for a new tone. That piece became Q Day Came Quietly.