French silicon spin-qubit startup Quobly believes it can, through leveraging semiconductor manufacturing processes, achieve a million qubits by the year 2032. To do this, it has built a network of relationships with research institutes, semiconductor manufacturers, quantum software companies and clients. As part of its international expansion, Quobly is growing its presence in Singapore through a research collaboration with the National Quantum Federated Foundry (NQFF) for silicon qubit characterization, as well as a strategic Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Entropica Labs for hardware-software co-design.
On the sidelines of NQFF Day in Singapore, we spoke with Maud Vinet, CEO of Quobly, on what quantum advantage really means, semiconductor manufacturing, and how the EU government is approaching quantum.
When to expect quantum advantage
One of the defining tensions in quantum computing today is the industry’s wildly different predictions for when “quantum advantage” will truly arrive. Some practitioners, such as John Martinis, have suggested that practical large-scale systems may still be a decade away. At the same time, companies like IBM have argued that certain forms of quantum advantage could emerge in the near future, at least for specialised use cases.
For Vinet, the apparent contradiction reflects a deeper misunderstanding: the industry’s leading voices are often describing entirely different milestones.
“When Dr John Martinis talks about ten years from now, he’s talking about thousands of logical qubits,” Vinet explains. “He’s talking about the long-term vision as we can see it today.” By contrast, she says, IBM’s claims of near-term quantum advantage refer to highly specific and narrowly-defined applications where quantum hardware may outperform classical systems in limited scenarios. “It’s happening,” she says, “but that’s not the end of the game.”
Vinet argues that these early demonstrations, while important, may not represent a decisive turning point. Classical computing techniques, particularly those enhanced by AI driven optimisation, continue to improve rapidly and could quickly narrow any temporary advantage gained by quantum systems in niche domains. In her view, the real challenge lies not only in building powerful hardware, but in ensuring that quantum systems evolve alongside practical customer needs.
“You can’t spend ten years without interacting with your customers,” she says. “You need to go to your customer and challenge your product and check that it fits expectations.” Technology, asserts Vinet, must be shaped continuously through real world engagement, experimentation and feedback.
Quobly’s own roadmap attempts to balance both timelines at once: the long horizon of large-scale fault-tolerant hardware, and the shorter cycle of customer collaboration and application development. Vinet describes the company’s target of delivering a one million qubit chip by 2032 as a concrete engineering commitment rather than a speculative ambition. “These are numbers. These are facts,” she says.
At the same time, Quobly is already working on nearer term milestones. The company plans to deliver a one hundred qubit chip next year, and has just released an open-source numerical toolbox, jointly developed with Foxconn, dedicated to the Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) algorithm. Such toolboxes, say Vinet, are part of Quobly’s strategy on building applications so that the eventual hardware is genuinely useful once it arrives.
This customer driven approach, she argues, reflects the modern reality of deep tech innovation. “It’s now the way you run innovation, at least deep tech innovation,” Vinet says. “You go to your customers and make sure that what you’re developing fits a need.”
The manufacturing bottleneck
For all the excitement surrounding quantum computing, one of the industry’s biggest unanswered questions remains brutally practical: how do companies scale from experimental systems with a few hundred qubits to machines with millions?
The science, Vinet argues, has more or less been settled, and the issue is increasingly one of execution.
“To me now, it’s really a matter of execution,” Vinet says. The most immediate constraint, she explains, is funding: securing the capital required to build increasingly sophisticated chips, expand the company’s engineering capacity and accelerate the feedback cycles needed to refine the technology.
One way to expedite this, says Vinet, is via Quobly’s strategy of building a broader industrial ecosystem through strategic collaborations. She points to the importance of supply chain coordination, drawing comparisons with the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which synchronised suppliers and manufacturers during the rise of Moore’s Law. Quantum computing, she argues, is entering a similar phase of industrialisation.
The balance between scientific discovery and engineering practicality also remains delicate. While silicon spin qubits have already demonstrated the validity of the underlying physics, Vinet argues that scaling the technology could still require new scientific insights if engineering complexity becomes too difficult to manage. “It’s always a trade off between science and technology,” she says.
Quobly’s approach relies heavily on adapting existing semiconductor expertise to the quantum domain. Although both conventional transistors and silicon qubits use the same underlying material, they operate in dramatically different physical regimes. Traditional chips work at room temperature with large numbers of electrons, while qubits manipulate single electrons at cryogenic temperatures.
She adds, “Currently we’re working with silicon experts to push their science down to low temperatures and a single electron, because there’s a huge difference between transistors that operate at room temperature with many electrons, and qubits: one single electron at low temperatures. Materials are the same, but the science is different. So we’re trying to bring in the expertise of those guys in a new regime, in the qubit regime.”
The role of government
In April 2026, the EU announced the launch of SPINS (Semiconductor Pilot Line for Industrial Quantum NanoSystems), which aims to manufacture and scale semiconductor‑based spin qubits – one of several EU government initiatives.
Government initiatives, says Vinet, have helped accelerate the quantum sector in that it has provided startups with testbeds and opportunities.
“…that has been really instrumental in speeding up the development of quantum technologies, because they are funding science education and they are providing space for startups and industry test beds. For instance, in Europe, they are promoting the installation of Quantum Processing Units (QPUs) in high performance computing centers. So it’s really speeding up the development of the industry.”
For governments, growing the quantum industry is a matter of national security. The technology’s potential implications for cybersecurity, defence, scientific research, and economic competitiveness have pushed quantum computing beyond the realm of academic experimentation and into the sphere of strategic infrastructure. Governments recognise that advanced computing capabilities may become strategically as important in the coming decades as semiconductors are today.
Concluding, Vinet points out, “It has a potential to disrupt encryption, but then it is also a matter of defense case use cases. In chemical warfare, for example, being able to simulate antidotes provides you with a competitive advantage. Computing has become critical infrastructure, and quantum computing is part of this infrastructure.”
