For a small country, Denmark is betting big on Quantum.
Joachim Bjorkmann is the Quantum Lead Europe, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Denmark, based at the Royal Danish Embassy in London. For five years, Joachim has been working with the UK and European (incl. Israel and Australia) quantum eco-systems to build and support international relationships and cross-border partnerships within the Danish quantum industry across both public, private and academic sectors.
For a small country, Denmark is betting big on Quantum. It all started in 2021, when then Secretary of State Antony Blinken was on a visit to Denmark to discuss bilateral ties – for all intents and purposes it was a fairly routine visit with talks with various ministers and the CEOs of the biggest Danish companies on the agenda, although a short 30 minute visit to the Niels Bohr Institute had managed to finagle it’s way in to the schedule. What happened next was anything but routine. A 30 minute lab tour turned into a 2+ hour discussion on everything Quantum, and the meetings with the CEOs of Denmark biggest companies were rescheduled. When the Secretary of State changes a program like that, the host nation tends to sit up and take note.
Niels Bohr’s legacy has always been vaunted in Denmark, but the reputation of Denmark’s quantum stronghold in the international community had snuck up on senior officials. In 2022, NATO DIANA (Defence and Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic) awarded Denmark the bid for the NATO Quantum accelerator (others within Aerospace, Cyber, AI and BioTech were awarded to other nations). Additionally in 2022, Novo Nordisk (of Ozempic and Wegovy fame and now Europe’s largest company by market capital) launched their incredibly ambitious Novo Nordisk Quantum Computing Program (NNQCP) to the tune of £220m, including a chip foundry appropriate named Quantum Foundry designed to build the first Danish fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2034. While a Danish national quantum strategy had been under proposal for a while in Denmark, these three events certainly accelerated matters and by late 2023 the Danish National Quantum Strategy had been launched.
A key focus for the national quantum strategy was funding for international research projects with Danish partners (Grand Solutions Quantum) an initiative which has been running at full tilt, as well as “Quantum House Denmark” a physical location in Copenhagen designed as a landing pad for Danish and international Quantum start-ups with access to researchers, investors, facilities and other stakeholders all within close proximity of each other. It really does not look like things will slow down either – EIFO (the Danish national investment fund) has established a Quantum investment fund, as has Novo Holdings. EIFO has now invested in Atom Computing (along with PensionDenmark), as well as an investment in Aquark Technologies (along with the NATO Innovation Fund). Novo Holdings has also invested in Quantonation’s second fund, and together Novo and EIFO established a joint venture called the Danish Centre for AI Innovation (DCAI) resulting in the purchase of an NVIDIA AI Supercomputer with the focus of doing research within AI, Life Sciences, CleanTech and Quantum (again, also open to international collaboration).
In case you may have missed it, there’s a theme here. Denmark’s intent with our national strategy and collaboration with partners like NATO and Novo is to provide an eco-system for international quantum companies to allow them to grow and develop, and for Denmark to position itself as a trusted, like-minded partner within Quantum that can support our friends eco-systems as well. A quantum enabled future is not something that anyone country, company or government can achieve on its own – in Denmark we understand this and we’re eager to work across borders to help realise the adoption of quantum technology in our society.