European Commission Announces Funding for Third Flagship on Quantum Technologies

Posted on

Friday, 22 April 2016

On April 19th, the European Commission presented its European Cloud Initiative for a digital single market, with cloud-based services and world-class data infrastructure, including €1 billion for a large-scale EU-wide quantum technologies flagship.

The European Commission presented a set of measures to support and link up national initiatives for the digitisation of industry and related services across all sectors and to boost investment through strategic partnerships and networks.

The public and private investment needed to implement the European Cloud Initiative is estimated at €6.7 billion. This additional investment includes €3.5 billion for data infrastructure, €1 billion for a large-scale EU-wide quantum technologies flagship and €0.2 billion for the actions on widening access and building trust. The Commission considers that this investment need can be met through a combination of funding from EU programmes, Member States and private sources. The initiative will over time generate revenue of its own through 'pay per use' content, and growing uptake by the scientific community, innovative startups and the public sector.

The Commission will progressively put in place the European Cloud Initiative through a series of actions, including, in 2018, launching a flagship-type initiative to accelerate the nascent development of quantum technology, which is the basis for the next generation of supercomputers.

This new quantum technologies flagship comes on the back of a Quantum Manifesto, written by a team of quantum technology experts across Europe, calling for the launch of a new quantum technologies initiative by the European Commission, and which has been signed by more than 3000 people. A further announcement about the new flagship is expected at the Quantum Europe conference in Amsterdam in May.

NQIT supports this initiative and participates through the involvement of our Director, Professor Ian Walmsley, who sits on the European Quantum Technology Advisory Board which contributed to this process.