Spain used a state coinvestment fund to anchor a UK quantum hardware maker's first EU factory. The 210 job Barcelona bet is a template for European industrial policy on strategic deep tech.
Spain's government is putting €46 million in public money behind a British quantum computer maker's first factory inside the European Union, and the deal is a working draft of how the bloc plans to keep strategic deep tech from drifting out of reach.
The money comes from FOCO, Spain's coinvestment fund run by state holding company COFIDES, and it anchors a £260 million (about $350 million) Series C funding round for Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC), a UK-based quantum hardware company. The physical expression of that bet is a new facility in Barcelona, the "OQC Global Quantum Development & Manufacturing Centre," that OQC says will begin operations in the fourth quarter of 2026, per Quantum Computing Report's coverage of OQC's Barcelona announcement. Total project budget is €92 million (about $98 million), with the FOCO contribution as the most prominent public anchor. The announcement frames the move explicitly as a play for "European technological sovereignty," a phrase that has become EU shorthand for keeping sensitive supply chains and intellectual property inside the single market. Catalonia, the regional government, also backs the site selection.
For a reader who has not followed quantum hardware: OQC builds superconducting quantum processors, the kind that need to be cooled to near absolute zero inside dilution refrigerators, and sells mostly to research labs, governments, and a small set of enterprise customers. OQC has roughly 150 employees globally. The 210 promised jobs over five years do exceed current headcount, but the announcement's "more than doubling" framing rests on a five-year window rather than a day-one payroll, which is worth keeping in mind. The trade on offer is simple in shape: public money accepts early-stage risk in exchange for a manufacturing footprint, a workforce, and a sovereignty signal that a foreign-owned quantum line will be built on Spanish soil.
The interesting question is not whether OQC is a serious company. It is, and the £260 million round is described in the announcement as the largest quantum-specific raise in Europe to date. The question is whether the Spanish state got a good deal. The falsifier for the announcement is straightforward: if OQC would have built an EU facility commercially regardless, then the €46 million accelerated or locked in a decision that was already in train, and the public wedge functions as a subsidy to private investors rather than a true strategic anchor. The burden of proof is on OQC to land the Q4 2026 timeline and the 210 jobs, and on COFIDES to show that any conditions attached to the FOCO money, such as hiring milestones, local supplier quotas, or IP retention clauses, are real rather than aspirational. As of the announcement, the specific FOCO terms are not detailed publicly.
What to watch next: the FOCO term sheet, when it surfaces, and the first payroll data from the Barcelona site. The Series C closed in late 2025. Operations are supposed to start in the fourth quarter of 2026. Between now and then, the only way to test the announcement is to watch whether the workforce grows and the first European-built OQC systems actually leave the line.