Germany has picked a winner in its push toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. The federal government has selected a consortium led by Hamburg-based QUDORA Technologies to build the NFQC-1k, a trapped-ion quantum computer targeting at least 1,000 physical qubits, backed by €122 million (about $138.8 million) in public funding.
The five-year project sits under Germany’s High-Tech Agenda Deutschland and aims to do more than produce a single machine. It is meant to stand up a domestic semiconductor pilot line for high-performance quantum processing units, giving Germany manufacturing capacity for quantum hardware rather than dependence on components sourced abroad. The government has set a broader target of having advanced quantum computers operational nationwide by 2030.
QUDORA’s technology bet is what it calls Near Field Quantum Control, or NFQC. Instead of relying on the bulky, alignment-sensitive laser arrays that many trapped-ion competitors use to perform logic gates, QUDORA routes control signals through microwave components built directly onto the surface of its quantum chips. The company argues this swap, trading lasers for foundry-compatible microwave electronics, produces longer coherence times by cutting down on the physical noise that laser-based systems introduce, while also being easier to manufacture at scale.
The NFQC-1k award builds on a base QUDORA has been laying for several years. The company, a spinoff from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, TU Braunschweig, and Leibniz Universität Hannover, already holds a €42 million contract with the German Aerospace Center to deliver a 50-qubit system built with NXP Semiconductors Germany, due in January 2027. It has also drawn €12 million from Germany’s federal research ministry for a separate three-year project, QuSTAC, aimed at integrating precision semiconductor electronics directly onto ion-trap processor chips, and it operates inside the government-backed QVLS-iLabs cluster in the Hannover-Braunschweig region, which itself recently secured a second funding phase worth €23 million.
Founded in 2021 and operating out of Braunschweig, Hannover, and Hamburg, QUDORA already offers cloud access to a 50-qubit system and has begun expanding internationally, including a subsidiary launched in Tokyo earlier this year. The NFQC-1k contract represents its largest single government commitment yet, and a clear signal that Berlin sees trapped-ion technology, not just superconducting qubits, as central to its quantum sovereignty strategy.
