On 18 August 2026 the Swedish government published Sveriges strategi för kvantteknikområdet and in this document I took some time to write down my thoughts on it. The document runs to 19 pages. It sets five goals to 2036 and 18 sub-goals under them.
It contains no figure of any kind. No kronor, no miljoner, no miljarder, no budget line, no deadline before 2036, and barely any named responsible body anywhere in the 18 sub-goals.
The election is on 13 September. Early voting opened on 26 August.1 So this landed a few weeks before a vote, from a government that will very likely not write the next budget. At least something to explain the lack clarity on the funding part. It does not explain the rest.
Every minute this strategy is on the table and not being acted on or discussed is a waste of tax-payer money and a lost opportunity, so lets get started reviewing.
A point of clarification here: in this post I’m sharing my personal perspective on this and anything I write here is representative of my personal views only. No one asked me to write this.
A strategy has to inform action
Does strategy work differ fundamentally when running a company or a country? Lets find some sort of procedure here to work from.
A guiding question for me here is “After someone reads your strategy, do they do something differently?”
If the answer is no, you have probably written something else. It may still be very useful and important. It may be a position paper or a vision statement, for instance. But it is not a strategy.
Richard Rumelt poses this same “test” in three parts.2 A strategy needs a diagnosis, which says what is actually wrong. It needs a guiding policy, which is the approach you pick. And it needs coherent action, which is what you will do in taking a certain approach. Drop a part and the thing stops working.
The most common failure, he says, is to mistake a list of goals for a strategy. “We want to be world-leading in X” is a wish. A strategy has to say how that wish is achieved.
This is a very different approach from what is typically seen in government strategy documents. Why is that? Do we really need to be more vague for an entire country to use a document as a guiding tool? I would hope the opposite.
Writing down what is wrong costs nothing. Setting a goal for 2029 instead of 2036 costs nothing. Saying which problem matters most costs nothing. However, they all require informed decision making. Saying what does matter can be equally as important as saying what does not.
Sweden did none of the this with this document.
The chain-link problem
A national quantum capability works like a chain. I really think it does.
You need physics - related theory explaining all of the tech branches in QT. You need a clean room to build the chips. You need cryogenics to keep them cold. You need control electronics, software and algorithms. You need experienced engineers who keep the equipment running. You need customers who know what to ask for. You need public buyers who are allowed to buy the products. You need security rules that still let people work with foreigners and “export” their research and code (this is becoming increasingly hard in the conflict landscape of Europe).
The weakest of those sets the ceiling for all the others. Rumelt calls this a chain-link system. Its property is unpleasant: pour resources into a strong link and nothing happens. To lift the ceiling you must find the weak link and fix it, or fix every link at once.
The second option is expensive and slow, and it looks worse before it looks better (as most things). You pay inside one mandate period and collect in someone else’s. This is the only form of development we (and our government) has to work with.
The document does idenfity some links. Its best paragraph is about the people who run the instruments:
“tydliga karriärvägar utanför universitets och högskolors meriteringssystem”
Those are the experienced engineers and technicians who maintain equipment, build processes and support users. A university merit system that only counts published papers and nothing else is a career limitation.
The document is equally sharp on two other links. It says access to advanced research infrastructure is limited in Sweden. It says the Swedish venture capital market struggles to finance companies built on hard science with long timelines.
And it also is self-critical at times:
“Samtidigt är den samlade volymen forskningsresultat inom detta område lägre än i flera jämförbara länder.”
Swedish quantum papers get cited well. Sweden does not produce enough of them.
So a diagnosis (out of many possible) is sitting right there, in four pieces. Then the document does nothing with it. It never asks which link binds. It applies the same phrase, ska öka, evenly across all of them.
In a chain, spreading effort evenly is the one allocation that reliably does nothing.
The Word Metrics
Lets have some fun counting words, look at the distribution of repeated words in their context, and some metrics.
| Sub-goals (delmål) | 18 |
| Sub-goals containing a number | 0 |
| Sub-goals containing a year | 0 |
| Sub-goals naming who is responsible | 0 |
| Sub-goals in the passive voice | 11 |
| Uses of ska (shall) | 56 |
| Uses of bör (ought to) | 2 |
| Mentions of kronor, miljoner, miljarder, budget, anslag | 0 |
| References to other government documents | 19 |
| Named international initiatives | 13 |
| Mentions of WACQT | 1 |
Every commitment is “ska”. The follow-up is “bör”. The document uses the binding form 56 times. It uses the softer form twice. One of those two is the sentence that would have created accountability:
“denna strategi regelbundet bör följas upp, utvärderas och utvecklas”
Interesting, what would that mean? Who is responsible for the follow up? No schedule. No owner. No indicator. Goals run to 2036 with nothing in between, so there is no year in which anyone can be called late, but by the same measure, no one can count successes in being early.
The document is exact about where it came from and vague about what happens next. It cites 19 other government documents by number: prop. 2024/25:60, U2025/00563, U2023/02127, KN2025/01161, skr. 2024/25:121 and more. It can tell you precisely which paper relates to it. It cannot inform of what should do. Something reinforcing this as a “wanted position” paper rather than a strategy.
There is one more count worth elaborating on here. The words “fokus” and “prioriterat” appear eight times between them. Interestingly, every single one describes somebody else’s priority: Nato’s strategy, the EU’s, the trade strategy, the research bill. The document never states a Swedish priority inside quantum technology. I would have liked to have read the opposite text - vague when speaking about the priorities of others, clear and active language when speaking about ours.
What the neighbours did
Sweden is obviously not alone in publishing a document like this. Indeed, it is probably a document Sweden needs just to sit at certain tables, having certain discussions. Lets have a look at what other nations bring to those tables.
| Country | Strategy | Published | Money attached | Coordinating body |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Netherlands | National Agenda for Quantum Technology | 2019 | €615m from the Nationaal Groeifonds in three periods (€54m 2021, €228m 2022, €273m 2024), plus €60.2m for a trilateral programme with France and Germany3 | Quantum Delta NL, founded 2020 |
| Denmark | National quantum strategy | 2023 | DKK 1bn public for 2023–2027, plus a DKK 2bn Novo Nordisk Foundation programme, an €80m machine, and a €134m venture fund4 | Innovation Fund Denmark |
| Finland | Quantum Technology Strategy 2025–2035 | April 2025 | €70m for 2024–2027 to scale the VTT/IQM machine to 300 qubits, on top of €20.7m for 2020–20245 | Proposed Quantum Competence Centre |
| Norway | Strategy due 2026 | pending | NOK 1.75bn announced August 2025; NOK 70m a year from 2025 and NOK 150m a year for five years from 20266 | Research Council, Innovation Norway, NSM |
| Sweden | Sveriges strategi för kvantteknikområdet | August 2026 | none in the document | none named |
Now compare the goals themselves. Finland’s strategy opens with a baseline and a target, printed side by side:7
| 2023 | 2035 target | |
|---|---|---|
| Quantum sector turnover | €130m | €3bn |
| Private investment | €50m | €400m |
| Jobs in industry | 460 | 10,000 |
You can argue with those numbers. That is the point. They are the kind of claim that can be wrong, which means they are the kind of claim someone can be held to. Sweden’s 18 sub-goals contain nothing anyone can be wrong about in some measurable fashion. Finland also names monitoring as one of its eight measures. Sweden says the strategy “bör” be followed up.
Finland looking increasingly attractive as a future place to live, id say!
Sweden’s flagship leans on a private foundation, and it ends in 2030
Sweden’s largest quantum research programme is the Wallenberg Centre for Quantum Technology. It began in 2018, was extended once from ten years to twelve, and now runs to 2030.8
Published figures for its size differ (happy to be corrected here). KTH and the Wallenberg Foundation put the programme at about SEK 1.4 billion. Chalmers, which hosts it, calls it “a 12 year SEK 1 billion research programme” on its own page. The gap is co-funding: the larger figure folds in contributions from industry and from the participating universities, Chalmers, KTH and Lund.9
So the largest single funder here is a private foundation rather than the state.
That needs a caveat, and I find the caveat more interesting than the headline. Chalmers, KTH and Lund are themselves government agencies. Part of that co-funding is public money. It just reaches quantum research through university block grants rather than through anything labelled quantum.
Clearly, holding those numbers behind the strategy asks questions. The government has set goals to 2036. The programme that produced the research position those goals rest on stops in 2030. The strategy mentions WACQT once, in passing, and says nothing about what follows it.
Denmark has the same private-foundation pattern, through Novo Nordisk. The difference is that Danish public money for quantum has a name and a number: DKK 1bn for 2023 to 2027, plus EIFO putting state capital into QuNorth alongside the foundation. Sweden’s public contribution is just important. Why is this not mentioned?
The public money Sweden does have is hard to see. The government’s excellenskluster (involvement in which has been the “labor of love” for me and my colleagues for the past year) assignment to Vinnova carries SEK 62m in 2025, 143m in 2026, 268m in 2027 and 537m in 2028. That money covers six technology areas — AI, advanced digital technology, quantum, energy, materials and biotech — with no per-area breakdown.10
So to a large extent Sweden cannot say what it spends on quantum technology. Not because the number is secret, but because it does not exist yet.
NordForsk surveyed the Nordic strategies - well done NordForsk! One would hope that any strategy work would start with that kind of approach. Against Sweden it could find only SEK 50m reserved for 2027 and SEK 100m projected for 2028.11 Against Denmark’s DKK 1bn and Finland’s €70m for one machine. Is the truth in the eye of the beholder here? I guess we will have to find that out eventually.
The decision Sweden already made, then unmade?
This is the sharpest thing in the document, and it comes entirely from Sweden’s own record.
A future quantum computer could break today’s encryption. There are two competing or complementing answers depending on how you look at it, extremely simply put here:
QKD is quantum key distribution. You send encryption keys as quantum states, so nobody can intercept them unnoticed. It needs new hardware and new fibre.
PQC is post-quantum cryptography. New mathematics that a quantum computer cannot break, running on the computers we already own. This is “classical” computation mostly.
Here is the strategy on QKD:
“utvecklingen av tekniken är ännu på ett mycket tidigt stadium och bedöms i dagsläget inte vara tillämpbar i en bredare omfattning”
And on PQC:
“är redan i dag standardiserade och tillgängliga”
One is not ready. The other is ready now. The document sets them side by side and decides nothing. Why?
At the same time, the critical part is that Sweden has already decided! In early 2024, four agencies co-signed a position paper on QKD: France’s ANSSI, Germany’s BSI, the Netherlands’ NLNCSA, and the Swedish National Communications Security Authority, Swedish Armed Forces.12 Their conclusion?
“Due to current and inherent limitations, QKD can however currently only be used in practice in some niche use cases… In light of the urgent need to stop relying only on quantum-vulnerable public-key cryptography for key establishment, the clear priority should therefore be the migration to post-quantum cryptography in hybrid solutions with traditional symmetric keying or classically secure public-key cryptography.”
Sweden’s own signals security authority put its name to that in 2024. The national strategy, published in 2026, presents both technologies as open options and picks neither.
A strategy would have followed those sentences with a decision. One such decision (just as an example out of many possible decisions here mind you): Sweden should focus on QKD for the research value, which there clearly is a lot of. Do not build national QKD infrastructure. Move the money to PQC migration across public agencies, which has finished standards and can start now.
This stance would make sense in a document that sets the context of urgent national security hardening, right?
I have long argued for direct involvement with EuroQCI from the Swedish side (shout out to Timothy Gibbon and colleagues at RISE here for pulling it together) since that train will leave the station otherwise, so I would argue for the opposite.
Instead the government wrote a document that lets Sweden hold both positions, two years after its own experts closed the question. While I argue for a prioritization of QKD, as a way of working that does not look good and is just confusing. Why is it strategically sound to have a government that goes against its authorities in national defence and security on a clear technological choice for the nation? One has to maintain their integrity here not to “attribute to malice that which can..”
What being behind means for Europe
Back to the perspective of the small nation in the big picture. The European Commission published its Quantum Europe Strategy in July 2025 and has a “Quantum Act” scheduled for 2026. The Act is meant to scale industrial capacity, including pilot lines and a design facility, and to govern supply chain resilience.13
That is a process for allocating industrial capacity across member states. Id like to think these things are concrete, measurable stuff. Pilot lines get sited somewhere and developed further (or abandoned). Design facilities get sited somewhere. Supply chain roles get assigned.
Countries arrive at that table with a position. Finland arrives with a machine, scaling to 150 qubits in 2026 and 300 by 2027, sited alongside its national supercomputing capacity.14 It can state what its sector turns over today and what it wants by 2035. Denmark arrives owning Magne (super exciting) and offering Nordic researchers access to it through a Danish company. The Netherlands arrives with €615m already committed and an agency whose job is to spend it.
Sweden arrives with 18 sub-goals, again, none of which contains a number.
This kind of positioning will have consequences, and none of them requires much imagination to see the end of.
Sweden becomes a rule-taker
If you have no national position on QKD versus PQC, you do not shape the EU position on it. You receive it. The same holds for standards, for pilot line siting, and for export control coordination. The strategy says Sweden should help “forma internationella principer, riktlinjer och standarder”. You form standards by having a view and the capability to back it. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but again, more of a passive outcome of not stating a clear position.
Swedish researchers queue for other people’s hardware.
Denmark’s Magne is explicitly open to the Nordic region. Finland is building to 300 qubits. Sweden’s contribution is a programme that ends in 2030 with no announced successor. Access is not the same as position. A country that uses other countries’ instruments does not set the research agenda those instruments serve. That is a weakness, but can also be an angle we should use as leverage. Should sweden be the software hub that binds all these facilities together?
The people follow the instruments.
This is the chain-link argument again. Talent and experienced engineers go where the equipment is. Denmark now has a €134m quantum-only venture fund and a machine. Finland has a clean room expansion and a roadmap. Sweden has a document that identifies its own engineering shortage and proposes nothing.
The strategy’s stated ambition is for Sweden to be “en betrodd och eftertraktad partner”. Being trusted and sought after is a function of what you can contribute, what work you do and how you do it. It is the response to repeatedly doing excellent work. We should strive to do excellent things not to be perceived as excellent.
A closing defence, and its shortcomings
Lets do the opposite take here and look at reasoning and the strongest version of the case against everything above. So this is a case against what my perspective of this is, not to create a straw-man out of this.
Sweden’s government cannot promise money for 2036 by function of their mandate periods. Riksdagen votes the budget one year at a time. This strategy landed three weeks before an election, from a government that may not survive it. Committing the next government’s money would not only have been improper but also clearly impossible.
More than that, the Swedish system deliberately puts operative detail somewhere else. Agencies get their instructions two ways as far as I understand it. One is the regleringsbrev (letter of regulation), the yearly letter that sets each agency’s job and its budget. The other is the myndighetsuppdrag, a specific task the government assigns. A strategy document is not a budget instrument. Vagueness is a function here that allows the government to shape the agencies work through more detailed documents with this strategy document as an achor.
You could also argue that a state should not bet on superconducting qubits over trapped ions - any modality. Governments predict badly since they dont have the technical insight to do otherwise. A public bet attracts lobbying. Refusing to pick a winner can be the right call.
Refusing to pick, stated out loud, is itself a strategy:
We will not bet on a platform, because the state predicts no better than the market. We will fund what pays off whichever platform wins: fabrication capacity, instruments, and the engineers who run them.
That rules things out. It sends money somewhere specific. And every piece of it already sits in the document — the clean room passage, the ladder of maturity across the four sub-fields, etc.
So the fault is not that the government refused to choose. The fault is that it never said why it refused. Breadth chosen on purpose is a strategy. Just be clear about that decision if that is the goal. Breadth by habit is not. The text gives the reader no way to tell which one this is.
Is there a fix?
Five things, all of which follow from sentences already in the document.
Name the weak link. The document has four candidates. Pick one and say it is the binding constraint. Fabrication capacity and the engineers who run it is my candidate.
Set one measurable goal before 2029 that has an acceptance criterion . For example: every public agency handling classified traffic has a costed PQC migration plan by 2029. Datable, ownable, fundable inside one mandate period.
Say something what happens after WACQT. The flagship ends in 2030 and the strategy runs to 2036. With this document that sentence (that absolutely needs to be written) is shifted to the next government (conveniently right before the election).
Publish what Sweden spends on quantum. Break the estimated excellenskluster money out by area. If the government cannot say the number, it should not manage it.
Close the QKD question. Sweden’s own authority closed it in 2024. Align the strategy with the position Sweden already signed. I am against that position, but seriously, we need clarity here. This is important.
The verdict
I do not think this is a bad strategy. That would introduce measures the document was never built to meet. It does two other jobs well. It gives Sweden something to hold up in Brussels and at the Nordic Council, and it gives Swedish agencies a mandate they can cite when they write the instruments that will carry the actual money. It is a policy or positioning document called the wrong thing. I think that it does decently well, and Sweden needs to have that document.
The chain-link reasoning does not care about any of that though. Quantum capability is set by its weakest part, not by the sum of its parts. Coordination is the one link only a state can fix, because no company earns money by fixing it.
The government worked out which job was its alone, and then wrote one sentence about it. That is goal three of five. It carries exactly one sub-goal, and that sub-goal says coordination should increase. Obviously, if our presence in this area is to increase (a strategy could be for it to decrease as well) clearly so does the coordination. So not even when giving itself a goal is it mentioned how that goal should be reached or measured. That is not acceptable use of my tax money.
There is also an additional fundamental problem here. This is not the automotive or farma industry we are talking about. This is deep tech. There are developments that still have lots and lots of interesting fundamental research to be done that will have large impact on the respective sub fields. I would have like to see a clear statement that shows awareness of that this requires different treatments. Deep tech strategy cannot be treated the same way as heavy established industry. We need guidance and we need to be able to estimate what we can fund. Otherwise Sweden will be more behind than it already is. We are also not treating these strategic decisions as time critical in that some of them can only be made at a certain time and not later.
Im sitting here on the train to stockholm at six in the morning thinking that, perhaps, if the goal is to reach quantum capability station, we need to start by looking at what trains take the longest trip,cost the most, and decide where we get on board. Some of these trains are not coming back and will not wait for late passengers.
Choo choo, Sweden.
Sources
- Sveriges strategi för kvantteknikområdet, Regeringskansliet, 18 August 2026. Press release
- Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, Crown Business, 2011.
- Position Paper on Quantum Key Distribution, ANSSI, BSI, NLNCSA and the Swedish National Communications Security Authority, 2024.
- Finland’s Quantum Technology Strategy 2025–2035, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment 2025:18.
- NordForsk, Current Landscape of National Strategies.
- Quantum Delta NL, Nationaal Groeifonds.
- QuNorth, EIFO and the Novo Nordisk Foundation acquire Magne.
- Chalmers, About WACQT.
- Uppdrag till Vinnova, excellenskluster, May 2025.
- European Commission, Quantum Europe Strategy, July 2025.
Footnotes
Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy / Bad Strategy (Crown Business, 2011). Read this book.↩︎
Quantum Delta NL / Nationaal Groeifonds; third phase, €273m, July 2024.↩︎
NordForsk, Current Landscape of National Strategies; Novo Holdings, DKK 1.4bn commitment; QuNorth acquires Magne.↩︎
Finland’s Quantum Technology Strategy 2025–2035, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment 2025:18; VTT and IQM, 300-qubit machine.↩︎
The Quantum Insider, Norway pledges over $100 million; Research Council of Norway, four new centres.↩︎
Finland’s Quantum Technology Strategy 2025–2035, Figure 2.↩︎
Chalmers research database, WACQT project entry, recording grants KAW 2017.0449, KAW2021.0009 and KAW2022.0006 over 2018–2030; Inside Quantum Technology, 16 March 2021, on the extension from ten years to twelve.↩︎
KTH, Wallenberg Center for Quantum Technology, WACQT: “SEK 1.4 billion”, “funded mainly by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation with contributions from Chalmers, KTH, Lund and industry partners”. Chalmers, About WACQT: “a 12 year SEK 1 billion research programme”. I have found no published breakdown separating the foundation’s grant from the co-funding, so treat SEK 1.4bn as a programme total, not a foundation grant.↩︎
Position Paper on Quantum Key Distribution, ANSSI, BSI, NLNCSA and the Swedish National Communications Security Authority, Swedish Armed Forces, 2024.↩︎
Quantum Europe Strategy; European Parliament Legislative Train, Quantum Act.↩︎
IQM to deliver a 300-qubit quantum computer to Finland: a 150-qubit system in mid-2026 and 300 qubits by late 2027.↩︎