Credit: Alice & Bob The Paris-based quantum computing company Alice & Bob and France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) announced today that they will collaborate on software enabling quantum computers to run alongside conventional supercomputers, without either party disclosing the financial terms. The project focuses on Qaptiva, a quantum application platform created by the French state-owned company Bull. Alice & Bob will connect their software to Qaptiva, allowing developers to write a program once and use it on different quantum machines. This setup will let workloads be shared between quantum and classical hardware. “Our priority is to make Alice & Bob’s unique FTQC technology usable in environments where real computational work happens,” said Chloé Poisbeau, Chief Operating Officer at Alice & Bob.“ The goal is more than just technical integration.
Leaders from both companies told Reuters they want Qaptiva to compete with Nvidia’s CUDA-Q, which is now widely used to connect quantum processors to GPU-based supercomputers. They also hope to prevent software from becoming a bottleneck for European machines. The research will begin with many-body physics, which studies how large numbers of interacting particles behave and is important for materials science and chemistry. The partners aim to create algorithms for early fault-tolerant quantum computers, which they expect to see by around 2030. “Many-body physics sits at the crossroads of fundamental science and industrial relevance,” said Jacques-Charles Lafoucriere, Program Director at CEA. “This collaboration lets us couple world-class HPC practices with Alice & Bob’s FTQC tech to define concrete, high-impact use cases, so that, when eFTQC systems reach the required maturity, the value creation pathways are already validated and ready to scale.” According to Reuters, Alice and Bob’s quantum computer will be installed at the CEA’s facilities in 2027; the agency currently hosts quantum computers from two other French firms, Quandela and Pasqal.
Alice and Bob constructs its processors using what are known as cat qubits, which are engineered to counteract one of the two primary types of error that affect quantum bits and, as a result, require fewer physical qubits for error correction. The company states that this method can reduce hardware requirements by up to 200 times and presented its Helium system in June. It has received support from Nvidia’s NVentures and is one of the companies involved in France’s state-supported quantum program. The software aspect is now being added to the hardware work as well, and it is a French contribution: the platform, the laboratory, and the machine will all be from France.
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