France’s national high performance computing agency, GENCI (Grand Équipement National de Calcul Intensif), announced it will acquire an 18-cat-qubit quantum computer from French quantum computing company Alice & Bob.
GENCI plans to install the machine at the Très Grand Centre de Calcul, a supercomputing center near Paris, and make it available for research in 2027. The agency will connect the system to its Joliot-Curie supercomputer so researchers can develop workflows dividing work between traditional HPC and quantum processors. The system will later connect to Alice Recoque, the European exascale supercomputer planned for the same site, GENCI said.
Alice & Bob built its technology to address quantum computing’s persistent error problem using cat qubits. Today’s quantum computers remain highly susceptible to environmental noise that can corrupt calculations. Developers generally address that problem by combining many error-prone physical qubits into a more reliable logical qubit, but the required hardware remains one of the field’s largest obstacles.
Alice & Bob’s cat qubits are designed to reduce the number of physical qubits needed for error correction by suppressing bit-flip errors at the qubit level. Named for the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, a cat qubit encodes quantum information in two opposite coherent states of a microwave field inside a superconducting circuit, and the company uses an engineered two-photon stabilization process to maintain those states. As the average number of photons increases, bit-flip errors become exponentially less likely.
That protection does not eliminate every source of error. Cat qubits remain vulnerable to phase flips, which disrupt how the states in a quantum superposition relate to each other and still require error correction. But by suppressing bit flips at the hardware level, the architecture could reduce the number of physical qubits needed to build reliable logical qubits. So far, that potential hardware advantage has been supported by theoretical work and small experimental systems but has not yet been demonstrated at a practical scale.
GENCI intends to use the system as a research platform for quantum error correction and hybrid computing, giving users experience with techniques designed for future quantum computers. The agency describes the purchase as the world’s first acquisition of a cat qubit quantum computer and the first early fault-tolerant quantum computer (eFTQC) planned for a European supercomputing center. The Alice & Bob machine will join Ruby, a neutral atom system from Pasqal, and Lucy, a photonic system from Quandela, giving researchers access to three different quantum computing architectures at one site.
Once operational, the machine will be available at no charge to academic and industrial researchers conducting open research through GENCI’s eDARI platform. The purchase is fully funded through the France Hybrid HPC Quantum Initiative, a €72.3 million program under France 2030.
The acquisition is also part of France’s long-term quantum program. GENCI said the system will help users prepare for two larger universal quantum prototypes that PROQCIMA, a program led by the French Ministry of the Armed Forces, aims to deliver by 2032. In May, President Emmanuel Macron announced another €1 billion for the strategy from 2026 through 2030.
