Copenhagen’s Quantum Foundry Plans a 5,300-Square-Meter Chip Fab – But What Will It Actually Build?

September 4, 2026 – Quantum Foundry Copenhagen (QFC) and the Novo Nordisk Foundation announced plans to build a 5,300-square-meter quantum chip fabrication facility in Copenhagen, with an expected opening in 2027.

QFC is owned by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The Danish enterprise foundation was established in 1924 and controls Novo Nordisk and Novonesis through its investment arm, Novo Holdings. The Foundation has committed more than DKK 2.9 billion (approximately €390 million) to quantum technologies as a whole, including the Novo Nordisk Foundation Quantum Computing Programme (NQCP) at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. The NQCP’s stated goal is to develop Denmark’s first fully functional fault-tolerant quantum computer before 2034. The new facility is one component of that broader commitment. Bloomberg reported that the plant will cost about $62 million.

QFC was founded in 2023 and develops proprietary tools, materials, and processes for quantum chip manufacturing. The company’s CEO is Peter Krogstrup, a professor of physics at the Niels Bohr Institute who previously served as Scientific Director at Microsoft’s Quantum Materials Lab. According to the announcement, the new facility will combine nanofabrication of quantum materials, advanced characterization, testing, chip assembly and packaging with ultra-high vacuum (UHV) manufacturing capabilities, and will offer wafer fabrication to quantum technology vendors globally on commercial terms.

Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, endorsed the initiative in the Foundation’s press release, linking it to the European Chips Act and the Quantum Europe Strategy. Denmark’s Minister of Business and Competitiveness, Martin Lidegaard, welcomed the announcement as a boost for Danish quantum research, innovation and manufacturing.

The announcement referenced the forthcoming Danish national quantum strategy, titled From quantum research to quantum industry, and the EU’s planned Quantum Act. The Commission’s 2026 work programme scheduled the Act for the second quarter of 2026. The Next Web reported from a European Parliament event on September 3 that the Commission now hopes to present it by the end of 2026, and that the date could slip into 2027.

My Analysis

How QFC Compares With QuantWare’s KiloFab

The nearest comparison is KiloFab, the dedicated quantum chip fab QuantWare is building in Delft. QuantWare has not published KiloFab’s floor area, so the two cannot be compared on size. Bloomberg put the cost of QFC’s plant at about $62 million. QuantWare raised a $178 million Series B in May, and The Next Web reported that most of it would go to KiloFab. KiloFab and QFC also differ in ownership, fabrication technology, and customer base.

KiloFab is a commercial open-architecture fab, purpose-built to manufacture superconducting quantum processors at industrial scale. QuantWare has shipped QPUs to more than 50 customers across 20 countries, added Intel Capital, In-Q-Tel, and ETF Partners as new investors in that round, and designed KiloFab specifically around its VIO modular chiplet architecture for processors targeting 10,000 qubits. The company sells its own processors and also offers foundry and packaging services for other companies’ qubit designs.

Unlike QuantWare, QFC is owned by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and has no venture backing. It manufactures quantum materials as well as devices, using ultra-high vacuum processing and bottom-up engineering for “extreme purity and atomic precision”. Its stated commercial offering, wafer fabrication for quantum technology vendors globally, remains aspirational: QFC has not disclosed a customer list, a backlog, or a shipped product.

What QFC Says It Will Build

QFC’s website describes wafer-based integrated circuits with superconducting, semiconducting and photonic components, and names atomic and isotopic purity as the company’s focus. The NQCP materials team, which works alongside QFC, flip-chip bonds both superconducting and photonic qubits, and the programme’s public Pathfinder toolkit includes a design module for transmon qubits and their resonators.

Peter Krogstrup’s own background is narrower. He was an assistant professor at the Niels Bohr Institute’s Center for Quantum Devices before he established and led Microsoft’s Quantum Materials Lab in Lyngby, outside Copenhagen, which grew materials for Microsoft’s topological qubit program. His research combines materials science and quantum physics and centers on epitaxial hybrid semiconductor-superconductor nanowires, and his Google Scholar profile lists over 17,500 citations.

In the abstract for a February 2024 talk at the University of Washington, Krogstrup described NQCP as tackling the challenge with “an agnostic and open mind towards qubit platforms” able to run fast, high-fidelity logic gates, on a 12-year roadmap of preparation, pathfinder and scaling phases. The press release names no target modality, and it attaches no platform to NQCP’s goal of a fault-tolerant computer before 2034. QFC’s website argues that processors good enough for utility-scale computing will need manufacturing tools with atomic-level precision and isotopic purity. The press release gives no device metrics, yields or customer names against which to judge that premise.

QFC applies its ultra-high vacuum approach to all three component families, so the method does not commit it to one platform. Neither the press release nor QFC’s website says which components the new facility will produce at volume for outside customers.

Two European Fabs, Two Models

QuantWare’s Series B and the QFC facility announcement came within four months of each other in 2026, and they follow two different models for building a European quantum manufacturing base.

QuantWare’s KiloFab is a venture-backed commercial play. The $178 million Series B, which QuantWare describes as the largest private round raised by a dedicated quantum processor company, came from investors who expect a return. KiloFab’s mandate is to manufacture and sell: produce VIO-architecture processors at scale, ship them to paying customers, drive down per-unit cost. Under the open-architecture model, QuantWare sells to anyone who needs a superconducting QPU but lacks captive fabrication.

QFC is a philanthropic-industrial play. The Novo Nordisk Foundation describes itself as an enterprise foundation with philanthropic objectives. Its cumulative €390 million quantum commitment is aimed at building Danish quantum capability, with explicit links to the NQCP’s research program at the Niels Bohr Institute and to Denmark’s national quantum strategy. QFC’s commercial offering to external vendors is a stated ambition, but the primary relationship is with the foundation’s own research program.

Both models have precedents in other technology domains. QuantWare’s foundry services echo the pure-play model TSMC built in classical semiconductors. The foundation-backed research-to-manufacturing pipeline resembles the Max Planck or Fraunhofer model in Germany, where public or philanthropic capital funds research infrastructure that later generates commercial spin-offs. Neither model is inherently superior, but they face different risks. QuantWare’s risk is commercial: can it fill a production line with paying customers? QFC’s risk is technical: can its materials-first process produce better qubits, and can it do so before the foundation’s patience and the field’s timeline diverge?

The EU Manufacturing Question

Beyond KiloFab and QFC, the Quantum Europe Strategy provides for six quantum pilot lines under the Chips Joint Undertaking, each with €40–50 million in joint EU and member-state funding, and places the first EU quantum foundries “towards 2030”. KiloFab and QFC are both scheduled to open before then. The Quantum Act will not come with a dedicated budget. At the September 3 event, Thomas Skordas, deputy director-general of the Commission’s DG CNECT, said “the act is not about budget” and described it as an enabling framework. Multiple EuroHPC quantum computers are either operational or in deployment across the continent.

The U.S. has moved at a much larger scale. IBM’s Anderon, a pure-play 300-millimeter quantum wafer foundry in Albany, finalized a $1 billion CHIPS Act award on September 16, matched by $1 billion from IBM, and says its first quantum wafers are already running. That is more money for a single quantum foundry than any European fab has announced. On September 8, GlobalFoundries finalized an award of up to $375 million to establish a domestic quantum foundry serving multiple qubit modalities. Both awards grew out of the $2.013 billion in letters of intent that the Commerce Department signed with nine companies in May. The U.S. commitment to quantum manufacturing infrastructure exceeds what Europe has mobilized by a substantial margin, and it flows through established semiconductor sites such as Albany.

The structural problem I have written about repeatedly persists: Europe attracts only about 5% of global private quantum funding, compared with over 50% for the United States, according to the Commission’s own Quantum Europe Strategy. QFC’s foundation-backed model sidesteps the private capital gap by not relying on private capital at all – a legitimate strategy, but one that scales only as far as the foundation’s commitment extends. Two of the largest European quantum hardware rounds since 2025 had U.S. investors in them: IQM’s $320 million Series B in September 2025 was led by the U.S. firm Ten Eleven Ventures, and QuantWare’s round brought in Intel Capital and In-Q-Tel, the U.S. national security community’s strategic investor.

Henna Virkkunen’s endorsement of QFC – linking it to the Chips Act, the Quantum Europe Strategy, and the forthcoming Quantum Act – signals that the European Commission sees dedicated quantum fabrication as part of its broader technological sovereignty agenda. Will the EU follow that endorsement with orders, contracts, and procurement commitments? Europe’s quantum startups need customers, not strategy documents.

What Remains Unclear About QFC

Quantum Foundry Copenhagen’s 5,300-square-meter facility, which Bloomberg put at about $62 million, is backed by a foundation that has committed more than €390 million to quantum technologies. A European Commission executive vice-president and Denmark’s business minister have endorsed it. That is a significant industrial commitment. But three things remain unclear. First, which of the superconducting, semiconducting and photonic components QFC lists it will fabricate at production scale, and for whom. Second, whether the offer of wafer fabrication on commercial terms to outside vendors reflects real market demand or a future aspiration. Third, how QFC’s timeline to useful output compares with KiloFab, which QuantWare scheduled to open in 2026 to supply a customer base that already numbers more than 50.

I read the announcement as a bet on manufacturing infrastructure. The facility is expected to open in 2027, and QFC has yet to disclose a customer, a backlog, or a shipped product. Europe needs dedicated quantum fabrication capacity, and QFC adds a meaningful facility to a thin pipeline. Whether that facility produces chips that go into working quantum computers – and which kind – depends on research milestones the press release does not address.