I Spent a Year Writing About Europe’s Quantum Failures. Now I’m Moving My Company There.

Introduction

In May 2025, I published a piece on Europe’s deep-tech commercialization challenges. I described an innovation paradox where the continent produces world-class science but struggles to convert it into scaled companies. Fragmented markets, risk-averse investors, academic cultures, and a venture ecosystem that tells a founder asking for €8 million to go apply for a €300,000 grant instead.

In June 2026, I followed up with an even blunter piece: EU Tech Sovereignty Has a Quantum Problem. I described a system that acknowledges its commercialization gap in every strategy document and then produces another strategy document. I shared my own fundraising anecdote — an American VC told me to come back asking for $30 million, while European investors suggested I form a consortium and apply for grants. I pointed out that In-Q-Tel, the CIA-backed strategic investor, was moving faster into European quantum companies than European institutions were.

I meant every word of both pieces. I still do.

And yet Applied Quantum is now relocating its headquarters from Singapore to the European Union.

The problems I described are real, but for the specific business I’m building, Europe’s strengths outweigh them. Most of the public conversation about European quantum misses what those strengths actually are.

The Components Are on This Continent

Applied Quantum is a quantum systems integration business. We integrate multi-vendor quantum computing systems from modular components. We already have our quantum lab in Delft, and we advise governments and enterprises on quantum strategy, PQC migration, and vendor due diligence. For that kind of company, where you are physically located relative to your supply chain is not a board-deck abstraction.

Look at where the quantum hardware components actually come from. Bluefors (dilution refrigerators) is in Helsinki. Kiutra (helium-3-free cryogenics) is in Munich. IQM (superconducting processors) is in Espoo and Munich. QuantWare (QPUs) is in Delft. Pasqal (neutral-atom systems) is near Paris. AQT (trapped-ion systems) is in Innsbruck. Qblox (control electronics) is in Delft. Delft Circuits (cryogenic cabling) is around the corner from Qblox. Quobly (silicon spin qubits) is in Grenoble, next door to STMicroelectronics’ 300mm fab.

A systems integrator needs to test component compatibility, resolve integration problems with suppliers, visit fabrication facilities, and maintain relationships with engineering teams. Doing all of that from Singapore with suppliers scattered across Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Austria adds cost, latency, and friction. Europe’s quantum supply chain is not just competitive — it is geographically concentrated in a way that favors a company whose entire business model depends on bringing those components together.

Sovereignty Policy Creates Purchase Orders

I criticized the EU’s sovereignty strategy for being long on diagnosis and short on execution, and that criticism still holds. But here is what I did not emphasize enough: sovereignty policy, even when it moves slowly, creates market demand.

The Quantum Europe Strategy says Europe must not depend on non-EU vendors for quantum computing — and that creates demand for alternatives. France’s DGA is running PROQCIMA as a genuine defense procurement competition among five European hardware companies, creating a supply chain that needs integration. The UK’s ProQure program allocates £1 billion for quantum hardware procurement through open competition. And EuroHPC, having deployed six quantum computers at supercomputing centers with multi-vendor interoperability, is generating demand for Quantum Open Architecture and the systems integrators who can make it work.

None of this exists in Asia, where I was based. Singapore has excellent research institutions and runs a smart national quantum program, but the commercial market for sovereignty-driven quantum systems integration does not exist at the scale it does in Europe. The US has larger quantum companies, but its market is dominated by vertically integrated players (IBM, Quantinuum,…) who want to sell you a complete stack, not hire an integrator to assemble one from components.

Europe’s quantum companies are specialists: a QPU maker here, a cryogenics company there, a control electronics firm down the road. I wrote in the sovereignty piece that this fragmentation could be a weakness if Europe tries to manufacture a European IBM by committee. But it is a strength if Europe adopts an open architecture model — and every signal from EU procurement, UK procurement, and the Dutch Tuna-5 project says that is where policy is heading. In a modular ecosystem, the integrator is the company that makes everything work together. That company needs to be where the components are.

The Neutrality Advantage Nobody Talks About

Quantum technologies are increasingly classified as dual-use. Export controls are tightening. The US Bureau of Industry and Security regulates which quantum technologies can be sold where. China faces reciprocal restrictions. The Wassenaar Arrangement covers quantum cryptography and sensing. This trend will accelerate as quantum computing approaches cryptographic relevance.

For a company that advises governments on national quantum strategy, helps enterprises migrate to post-quantum cryptography, and integrates quantum computing systems that touch national security infrastructure, the geopolitical alignment of your home jurisdiction is a material business issue.

If I were headquartered in the US, every government client outside would have to consider whether my company carries obligations under US law – FISA, national security letters, the complex relationship between American technology companies and American intelligence services. The history is not reassuring. The Snowden disclosures. Dual EC DRBG and the NSA’s documented involvement in weakening a NIST cryptographic standard. The persistent ambiguity about whether NSA’s role in CNSA 2.0 and PQC standards-setting is purely advisory or something more complicated. I do not need to take a position on whether those concerns are justified for every client in every context. I need only observe that the concerns exist and that they affect purchasing decisions.

The EU occupies a distinctive position in this picture. It is not geopolitically neutral in the way Switzerland claims to be. It has allies, interests, and a defense posture. But it is the most trade-agreement-rich, least geopolitically contentious major technology jurisdiction in the world. An EU-based quantum company can work in the Middle East, ASEAN, India, Latin America, and Africa without carrying the baggage of superpower rivalry. When I sit across from a Gulf government official who wants help building national quantum-safe cryptographic infrastructure, the conversation is different when I’m coming from Delft/Ljubljana/Geneva than when I’m coming from Virginia.

As the quantum threat to cryptography becomes a strategic concern for governments outside the US-China axis, those governments will look for quantum security advisors they trust. Trust, for national cryptographic infrastructure, means confidence that your advisor has no hidden obligations to compromise the migration. The EU’s position offers that trust at a level that neither the US nor China can match for non-aligned clients. And the Gulf’s deep-tech market is growing fast — with the EU a four-hour flight away, compared to twelve from the US.

Regulation Is Creating a Pull Market for PQC

In the US, PQC migration is driven by CNSA 2.0 and NSM-10, which apply primarily to government and defense. The commercial sector is moving, but there is no binding regulatory deadline for most private-sector organizations.

Europe is different. DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) covers the entire EU financial sector and demands operational resilience against emerging technology risks. NIS2 extends similar requirements across critical infrastructure. The Commission and Member States published a Coordinated PQC Implementation Roadmap in June 2025. FINMA issued dedicated quantum-risk guidance in July 2026. The UK’s NCSC set three milestones: complete cryptographic discovery by 2028, migrate high-priority systems by 2031, complete migration by 2035.

This regulatory density creates an addressable market for PQC migration services — crypto-agility consulting, cryptographic inventories, migration planning, vendor selection, implementation oversight — that is already forming. The Applied Quantum PQC Migration Framework has over 15,000 downloads, and the questions I get from European CISOs are no longer “should we start?” but “how do we scope the program and when do we need to finish?” As I argued in Forget Q-Day Predictions — Regulators, Insurers, Investors, Clients Are Your New Quantum Clock, the question of when Q-Day arrives is increasingly irrelevant. The deadlines are already set. And most of the binding ones are European.

Being inside that market as it forms, rather than trying to enter it later from outside, is a timing advantage I cannot afford to miss.

The Talent Pool Is Deeper Than the Headlines Suggest

The standard narrative is that Europe trains excellent quantum scientists who then leave for better-paying jobs at Google, IBM, or startups in the Bay Area. There is truth in that. But the narrative overstates the drain and understates the depth.

Europe produces quantum PhDs and engineers at scale across a wide geographic range — and not just from the universities that make the headlines. Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana does serious work in quantum information and NV-center physics. Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb has strong theoretical and computational physics. Austrian universities (Innsbruck and Vienna) are global leaders in quantum optics and trapped-ion research. Swiss institutions (ETH Zurich, EPFL) need no introduction. Scandinavian programs at Chalmers, KTH, and the University of Copenhagen are producing competitive graduates. These are EU or EU-adjacent institutions whose graduates can work anywhere in Europe without visa friction.

For a small company competing with IBM and Google for talent, I cannot match their compensation. I know this. But many quantum engineers, especially Europeans with families, do not actually want to live in San Jose. They want to live in Munich, or Delft, or Ljubljana, or Zurich. Europe’s healthcare, education, safety, and livability are retention tools that show up nowhere in the funding statistics but matter enormously at the hiring margin. Applied Quantum can offer a role where you work on real quantum systems, live in a European city, and keep a life outside work. That package is more competitive than the salary gap implies.

Southeastern Europe specifically offers something the Delft-Munich-Paris corridor does not: excellent physicists and engineers at a fraction of Western European labor costs, within the EU legal framework. For a growth-stage company that needs to build a team fast without burning through capital at Western European rates, that geographic reach inside the single market is a material advantage.

What Changed

None of the arguments above would have been strong enough a year and a half ago. The reason I’m making this move now, and not in 2024, is that several things shifted in 2025 and 2026 that tipped the calculation.

PROQCIMA is no longer a press release. Five companies are in the competition, the DGA is running it like a defense procurement, and the timeline targets (128 logical qubits by 2030) are tied to funding milestones. The UK’s ProQure program is procuring quantum computers, not studying whether to procure them. EuroHPC has all six of its initial quantum systems inaugurated and opened pilot access in June 2026. These are operational facts, not strategy-document promises.

Two of Europe’s most important quantum hardware companies, IQM and Pasqal, went through public listing processes in 2026. IQM trades on Nasdaq as IQMX. Pasqal signed a definitive SPAC merger at a $2 billion valuation. Alice & Bob delivered a cat-qubit system to GENCI — the first eFTQC platform accessible to French researchers. QuantWare raised €152 million. These are still smaller numbers than their American peers, and the IPO route through SPACs carries its own risks. But the trajectory has changed. European quantum companies are reaching growth stages that did not exist two years ago.

European defense spending is at its highest growth rate in decades, post-Ukraine. France’s quantum strategy is explicitly defense-led. Germany’s new Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space has quantum at its core. The EU’s own tech sovereignty agenda, imperfect as I’ve argued it is, has created political consensus that certain technologies require European capacity. Quantum is on that list. That political consensus, even when it moves frustratingly slowly, directs procurement budgets.

The Bet

I want to be clear about what this move is and is not.

It is not a retraction. The European quantum ecosystem’s problems: the capital formation gap, the cultural risk aversion, the fragmentation, the grant-application reflex; are as real today as when I wrote about them. I do not expect a €300,000 grant suggestion to turn into a $30 million term sheet because I changed my mailing address.

It is a bet that for a quantum systems integration and advisory company, Europe’s advantages now outweigh its well-documented disadvantages. The supply chain is here. The regulatory-driven demand is here. The talent is here. The neutrality advantage is here. The defense budgets are growing. The open architecture model that my business depends on is the model that European procurement is adopting. And the Middle East market, which is growing faster than any other deep-tech market outside the US, is four hours away.

The problems I wrote about are problems for a European quantum hardware company trying to raise a $500 million round to compete with Quantinuum. They are less acute for a company that integrates, advises, and secures. My business benefits from Europe’s quantum ecosystem being strong enough to produce excellent components, and from European policy being ambitious enough to create demand for integration and security services. Those conditions now exist.

Whether Europe closes its wider commercialization gap — whether it produces fault-tolerant quantum computers at scale, retains its most promising companies, and converts scientific leadership into sovereign industrial capability — is a larger question that I will continue to write about, and push on, from the inside.

I am moving my company because I believe the answer to that question is “yes, probably, eventually, if enough people stop writing strategy documents and start building.” I would rather be wrong from Delft than right from Singapore.