After artificial intelligence, NVIDIA is now advancing its pawns in quantum. The American group announces the entry of its investment vehicle NVentures into the capital of Alice & Bob, one of the most observed European startups in the race for fault-tolerant quantum computing.
The operation is part of the 100 million euro extension of Series B led by Future French Champions, AVP and Bpifrance. The amount invested by NVIDIA has not been revealed, but the American group’s interest goes far beyond financial logic. For several years, quantum has been presented as the next major technological breakthrough after AI. However, despite successive announcements from manufacturers and governments, the sector remains confronted with a brutal technical reality: quantum computers remain extremely unstable, expensive and difficult to industrialize. It is precisely on this lock that Alice & Bob is trying to build its advantage.
The company, founded in Paris, is developing an architecture called “cat qubit†, designed to intrinsically reduce quantum errors. The objective is to drastically limit the number of physical qubits necessary to obtain calculations that can be used on a large scale. The startup now claims to be able to reduce hardware requirements by up to 200 times compared to certain competing approaches.
Since 2024, NVIDIA and Alice & Bob have already been collaborating on CUDA-Q, cuQuantum, Dynamiqs and NVQLink, the software and hardware building blocks intended to connect quantum computing and classic GPU infrastructures.
From this perspective, future quantum computers will not operate autonomously, and will be integrated into hybrid architectures combining GPUs, simulation, software orchestration and specialized quantum processors. Quantum will connect to current infrastructures.
The logic is strongly reminiscent of what happened in AI. OpenAI, Anthropic or Mistral AI develop the models, but the critical infrastructure remains largely controlled by NVIDIA: GPU, frameworks, software optimization and interconnections. The American group now seems to want to occupy the same position in quantum.
The announcement of this investment comes in a context of strong geopolitical acceleration, with in particular the announcements of Donald Trump yesterday on an investment of 2 billion dollars and that of Emmanuel Macron today aiming to extend the first French quantum plan launched in 2021, convinced that quantum will become a critical infrastructure for defense, chemistry, energy, cybersecurity or finance.
The challenge for Europe is to avoid the scenario already observed in the cloud or AI, where the dominant technological layers were finally captured by American groups.
This is probably where the next industrial battle will be played out. Because behind the scientific promise of quantum there is already a much more classic confrontation for the control of platforms, software environments, hybrid computing centers and future critical infrastructures of the digital economy. A logic which is beginning to strongly resemble that observed in artificial intelligence, where domination is not built solely on models, but on mastery of the entire technological stack.
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