France's Macron to announce €1.5 billion for quantum computing, advanced microchips

French President Emmanuel Macron will announce on Friday that France will invest an additional €1 billion ($1.16 billion) in its quantum strategy and €550 million in a support programme for the microelectronics sector, as global powers race to be first to leverage emerging technology.

The announcement will come a day after the Trump administration unveiled plans to take $2 billion in equity stakes across nine quantum-computing companies to push to secure U.S. leadership in the technology that is set to become the next frontier after AI.

• Technological breakthroughs have deepened investor interest in quantum computing's potential to speed up tasks from drug discovery to financial modelling and cryptography.

• A "massive" increase in investment has been driven by the realisation that computing infrastructure is "more and more crucial in our economies", Theau Peronnin, CEO of quantum computing firm Alice & Bob, told Reuters.

• The company is among those to receive support from the new French funding, and said on Friday it has also won funding from Nvidia's NVDA.O venture capital arm NVentures to develop hardware to make quantum computing less error-prone.

• Alice & Bob focuses on "cat qubits", a type of quantum bit designed to be more resistant to errors than normal qubits, addressing one of quantum computing's biggest problems.

• The new investment, which adds to a €100 million Series B round raised last year, follows collaboration between Alice & Bob and Nvidia on several projects recently.

• The company is participating in France's PROQCIMA programme led by the Ministry of the Armed Forces, which aims to have two French-designed prototypes of universal quantum computers ready for industrialisation by 2032.

($1 = 0.8618 euros)

-Dominique Patton/Reuters