NVIDIA slips through a mouse hole to climb aboard Alice & Bob.

After artificial intelligence, NVIDIA is now advancing its position in quantum computing. The American group has announced that its investment vehicle NVentures is taking a stake in Alice & Bob, one of the most closely watched European startups in the race toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.

The deal is part of the extension of the company’s €100 million Series B round led by Future French Champions, AVP, and Bpifrance. NVIDIA did not disclose the size of its investment, but the move clearly goes far beyond financial considerations. For several years, quantum computing has been presented as the next major technological breakthrough after AI. Yet despite repeated announcements from industrial players and governments, the sector still faces a brutal technical reality: quantum computers remain highly unstable, extremely costly, and difficult to industrialize. This is precisely the bottleneck Alice & Bob is trying to solve.

Founded in Paris, the company is developing a so-called “cat qubit” architecture designed to intrinsically reduce quantum errors. The goal is to drastically limit the number of physical qubits required to achieve large-scale usable computation. The startup now claims it can reduce hardware requirements by up to 200 times compared with 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 with conventional GPU infrastructures.

In this vision, future quantum computers will not operate autonomously but instead will be integrated into hybrid architectures combining GPUs, simulation layers, software orchestration, and specialized quantum processors. Quantum computing will effectively plug into existing infrastructure stacks.

The logic strongly resembles what has already happened in artificial intelligence. OpenAI, Anthropic, or Mistral AI may develop the models, but the critical infrastructure remains largely controlled by NVIDIA through GPUs, frameworks, software optimization, and interconnect technologies. The American group now appears determined to occupy the same strategic position in quantum computing.

The announcement comes amid accelerating geopolitical competition, notably following Donald Trump’s announcement yesterday of a $2 billion investment initiative, alongside Emmanuel Macron’s announcement today aimed at extending France’s first national quantum plan launched in 2021. Both governments are increasingly convinced that quantum technologies will become critical infrastructure for defense, chemistry, energy, cybersecurity, and finance.

For Europe, the challenge is to avoid the scenario already seen in cloud computing and AI, where the dominant technology layers ultimately ended up under American control.

This is likely where the next industrial battle will be fought. Behind the scientific promise of quantum computing, a far more conventional struggle is already emerging over the control of platforms, software environments, hybrid computing centers, and the future critical infrastructure of the digital economy. A dynamic that increasingly resembles what has already unfolded in artificial intelligence, where dominance was not built solely on the models themselves, but on control of the entire technological stack.