Supreme plans to take superconducting quantum devices to high technology and manufacturing readiness levels across Europe
Photo credits: Manuel / Unsplash
The Superconducting European Quantum Pilot Line (Supreme) consortium, which was set up in 2025 to industrialise superconducting quantum technologies, including chips, has been granted a total of €50 million by the EU Chips Joint Undertaking and national funding agencies. This funding will cover its first three and a half years of work, starting in early 2026.
Superconducting quantum devices are able to create and manipulate quantum information, or qubits. They use superconducting materials, whose absence of electrical resistance enables quantum computers to operate at very low temperatures, which is essential to maintain the coherence of qubits.
Supreme plans to develop scalable and stable fabrication processes for these devices, and to make them available to companies through process design kits. These will provide design rules and validated process specifications, and piloting services, including shared fabrication runs to split the cost between users, to help them develop their own systems. In July 2025, the consortium said that its first technologies would be available to external users in 2027.
“This initiative has been set to strengthen the European quantum ecosystem. We will make sure that the innovations developed through Supreme can be widely adopted by businesses across Europe,” said Pekka Pursula, coordinator of the consortium and vice-president for microelectronics and quantum technology at Finnish research organisation VTT, in a statement.
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Since 2019, the EU and its member states have invested more than €11 billion in quantum technology. But while Europe leads the world in the number of scientific publications on quantum, the continent ranks only third in patents. The project is expected to support the Quantum Act, which the European Commission will adopt in the second quarter of 2026 as part of efforts to fill this commercialisation gap, as well as the Chips Act, which targets a doubling of Europe’s global market share in semiconductors to 20%.
The Supreme consortium is composed of 23 partners from eight member states, including research organisations and universities such as Delft University of Technology and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), as well as large companies and SMEs such as Infineon Technology, Alice & Bob and Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech.
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