A joint perspective from kiutra and the Danish Quantum Community on why the quantum industry is going circular
Ask what a quantum computer can do, and you’ll get a keynote. Several, in fact, as quantum conference season is just getting started around the world this September. Ask what it’s made of and the room goes quiet.
Yet the answer decides more about the industry’s future than most roadmaps: rare earths are controlled by China niobium from a single country, helium-3 allocated under nuclear governance rather than sold on a market. Quantum’s most celebrated machines are built from some of the world’s least secure supply chains, and almost nothing in them is ever recovered.
There is a strategy that addresses this, and it wasn’t invented for quantum: the circular economy. It is usually filed under sustainability. It belongs just as firmly under sovereignty.
The material risk behind quantum hardware
Earlier this year, kiutra and CIRCULAR REPUBLIC (UnternehmerTUM), supported by the European Quantum Industry Consortium, published Circularity in the Quantum Industry (read here), a systematic look at the material foundations of quantum hardware.
Many of the materials quantum systems depend on combine high economic importance with elevated supply risk. Production is heavily concentrated: China dominates supply of light and heavy rare earths and the majority of gallium, and a single country accounts for over ninety percent of niobium. For most of these materials, EU production covers a negligible share of demand and end-of-life recycling rates cluster close to zero. Today’s quantum hardware, in other words, runs almost entirely on primary extraction from concentrated foreign sources.
Cryogenics adds helium-3 into the equation, one of the scarcest resources on earth, in dilution refrigerators used by essentially all superconducting and spin-based platforms. A by-product of nuclear weapon programs, it falls under security and non-proliferation governance rather than raw-materials policy: a strategically scarce isotope and a single-point failure risk for sub-kelvin infrastructure.
The report’s conclusion is not that quantum will drive global scarcity as volumes are far too small for that. The risk architecture is different: extreme specialisation, single suppliers, no bargaining power, and no visibility into what sits behind black-box subsystems.
Circularity mitigates this exposure along two distinct lines one environmental, one strategic. Both matter and they reinforce each other.
The sustainability case: act before lock-in
The environmental argument is about timing as much as footprint. The quantum industry has an advantage that the semiconductor and rare earth magnet sectors never had: it is still early. Architectures are unsettled, supply relationships are not locked in, and circular principles like material transparency, design for disassembly, modularity at the interface level, aggregation of low-volume material streams can still be embedded before product architectures harden.
The cost of waiting is well documented. Quantum can choose a different sequence: reduce primary extraction, close material loops, and design supply-chains from the start, while the volumes are still small enough to regulate it.
For the cryogenic infrastructure, this is not an abstraction. kiutra’s magnetic cooling platforms do not require helium-3 in the system and have a modular architecture where cooling capacity scales independently of the payload and hardware is serviced and upgraded rather than replaced.
The sovereignty case: the same loops, seen from NATO’s side of the table
The second argument for circularity is strategic. Every closed material loop is also a severed dependency. Secondary supply chains built in Europe reduce exposure to export controls, allocation politics and single foreign suppliers. Recycling infrastructure is resilience infrastructure.
This reading has moved from the margins to the centre of policy. Europe’s renewed focus on technological sovereignty, sharpened by NATO’s attention to critical dependencies and dual-use technologies has put material supply chains under a hard light and quantum appears on every critical-technology list published in the last years. Yet a quantum capability built on materials refined elsewhere, allocated by other governments, is a capability with conditions attached. Sovereignty in quantum is usually discussed in terms of chips, IP, and talent, but it should also be discussed in terms of critical infrastructure, and circularity is one of the fastest levers available for improving supply security.
The policy window is open now. The forthcoming EU Quantum Act is expected to carry a supply-chain resilience pillar, offering a once-in-a-decade opportunity to anchor circular principles in law before the sector reaches commercial scale.
Copenhagen: where both cases are being tested at national scale
Nowhere in Europe is this convergence taken more seriously than in Denmark, and nowhere is it backed with comparable capital relative to the country’s size.
The example runs from the Niels Bohr Institute, where quantum mechanics took shape a century ago, to one of the most deliberate national quantum efforts anywhere today. The Novo Nordisk Foundation has committed hundreds of millions of euros to its Quantum Computing Programme, aimed at a fault-tolerant machine for life-science applications. QuNorth, jointly funded by the Foundation and EIFO — Denmark’s export and investment fund — is bringing Magne online: a Level 2 quantum computer built on logical qubits by Atom Computing and Microsoft, expected to be among the first commercially available systems of its kind when it starts work around the turn of the year.
Magne is worth pausing on, because it embodies the sovereignty argument in hardware. The machine is fully Danish-owned, physically sited in Denmark, with access prioritised for Nordic researchers and companies, so that data stays in the region and quantum competence is built at home rather than rented from abroad. This is a critical sovereign capability that underpins a national strategy.
Around these flagships sits a dense commercial ecosystem, largely concentrated in Copenhagen: photonics and enabling-hardware companies whose components ship into quantum labs worldwide, quantum software firms, and international players choosing Denmark as their base. Atom Computing, for instance, selected Copenhagen for its global headquarters, and Microsoft’s quantum efforts have deep Danish roots, with their largest quantum effort, globally, located just north of Copenhagen. The Danish Quantum Community connects this landscape across research, industry and government, giving the ecosystem something many larger countries lack: coordination.
For the circularity agenda, that matters. An ecosystem this concentrated and this well-connected is precisely where shared material mapping, aggregation of low-volume material streams, and cross-sector pilots become practical rather than aspirational.
“The Danish quantum community has always worked across the full picture, from fundamental research to the industrial and security dimensions of the technology. Circularity speaks to both: it makes our industry more sustainable and, at the same time, more independent. That combination decides whether Europe deploys quantum on its own terms.” – Kristine Helen Falgren, Danish Quantum Community
None of this is theoretical for Denmark, and the Niels Bohr Institute.
First, as an early adopter: the Institute put kiutra’s cryogen-free magnetic cooling to work in day-to-day research well before “supply-chain resilience” entered the industry’s discussions. The institutions with the deepest understanding of quantum physics were among the first to move away from consumable-dependent cryogenics. Research pragmatism and strategic foresight pointed in the same direction.
Second, as a place where the next generation of quantum talent is trained: the Institute’s Quantum Training Lab, supported by the A.P. Møller Foundation and the Novo Nordisk Foundation, is the first lab of its kind to build real millikelvin experiments systematically into the student curriculum. Traditionally, hands-on work at these temperatures was reserved for PhD students, simply because conventional cryostats were too slow, too delicate and too consumable-hungry for classroom use.
At the QTL, bachelor’s and master’s students load their own samples into a kiutra L-Type Rapid, run their own cooldowns, and measure superconducting transitions and the quantum Hall effect themselves with the lab running up to two full measurement sessions a day. Seventy-five students went through the course in its first year, and more than six hundred high-school students have visited the lab through the Institute’s outreach programme. More about the education program can be read here: https://kiutra.com/niels-bohr-institute-quantum-training-lab/.
This is what circular infrastructure looks like in practice, and it closes the loop on the sovereignty argument, too. A cooling platform that consumes no helium-3 and turns experiments around in hours doesn’t just remove a material dependency; it changes who gets access to quantum experimentation, and how early and this process needs still a clear supply chain plan.
“Material circularity is only half the picture and a clear supply chain plan still needs to sit alongside it. Sovereignty is built on materials and machines, but it runs on people, and Denmark is training them years ahead of the traditional timeline, with NBI leading the way on that workforce pipeline” – Tomek Schulz, kiutra
Capital is reading the same signals
Investors have noticed, and the largest of them sits in Copenhagen too. 55 North, the world’s biggest dedicated quantum technology VC fund, anchored by Novo Holdings and EIFO, is itself a product of the Danish ecosystem described above. Among its first investments: co-leading kiutra’s €13 million Series A-2, alongside its backing of European quantum leaders. The thesis is consistent with everything above: quantum is getting now a strategic infrastructure, and the enabling cooling layer is where scale is won or lost.
“Infrastructure and the quantum supply chain will be the enabling factor for the success of the global quantum ecosystem by the end of the decade. Kiutra sits squarely in this value proposition, delivering best-in-class capabilities into the market today, and is positioned to scale with the demand by eliminating its dependence on critical materials.” – Kai Hudek, 55 North
The conversation continues in Copenhagen
These threads sustainability, sovereignty, critical infrastructure, research leadership and capital converge soon in one place this September. Q2B Copenhagen (9–10 September) brings the international quantum industry to Denmark. Danish Quantum Community will host the Danish Quantum Pavilion together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, Novo Nordisk Foundation, Novo Holdings and 55 North, and kiutra will be exhibiting alongside partners from across the ecosystem and taking part in the program with a talk of its own
We invite everyone to continue discussion at the Q2B event in Copenhagen
Kristine Helen Falgren, MBA, Managing Director of Danish Quantum Communty & Dr. Tomek Schulz COO & Co-founder of kiutra.
