A joint venture announced during Mohammed bin Salman's state visit to France will deploy French quantum systems inside the Kingdom — the clearest sign yet that a hundred-year-old relationship built on oil is being rebuilt around computing.
Riyadh and Paris Move Their Partnership Into Quantum
Aalimi Nation · Technology & Business Desk | Paris
Pasqal, the French neutral-atom quantum computing company, and Eleven Ventures, a Saudi investment platform, announced on Monday an agreement to establish a commercial joint venture to deploy and scale quantum systems across Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East and North Africa.
The venture plans to install multiple quantum systems in the Kingdom in the coming years, operate them, and sell access to customers across the region. Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki bin Talal, who founded Eleven Ventures, has been appointed chairman of the board of the new entity, Pasqal Arabia.
The announcement was timed to the state visit of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman to France, which began on Sunday. Saudi officials visited Pasqal's headquarters and its quantum computer production site as part of the trip.
The stated intention goes beyond selling hardware. The venture is expected to build local talent and expertise so that, in the companies' formulation, quantum capability is developed within the Kingdom rather than accessed from abroad.
What is already on the ground
The joint venture is not starting from zero, which is what distinguishes it from most technology announcements made during state visits.
In November 2025, Pasqal deployed a 200-qubit neutral-atom system at Saudi Aramco's data centre in Dhahran — Saudi Arabia's first operational quantum computer. On 18 May this year, Aramco and Pasqal formally inaugurated it and launched the Middle East's first commercial Quantum Computing as a Service platform, giving enterprises, universities and research institutions remote cloud access to the machine.
Aramco's structured programme with Pasqal targets specific industrial problems: port logistics optimisation, CO₂ storage, well placement, rig scheduling. Aramco's venture arm, Wa'ed Ventures, first invested in Pasqal in January 2023, and remains among its backers.
Pasqal itself has been on a steep trajectory. In March it raised more than €340 million at a $2 billion valuation, with investors including Quanta Computer, LG Electronics, Temasek, Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Ventures and Bpifrance, ahead of a planned Nasdaq listing. In April it announced a 1,000-qubit roadmap. In May it filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to list via a SPAC.
Two of its earliest and largest strategic investors are Saudi. That matters for reading Monday's announcement: this is an existing commercial relationship being formalised, not a new one being invented for the cameras.
The visit around it
The quantum deal sits inside a larger diplomatic architecture.
This is Mohammed bin Salman's third visit to Paris, following trips in 2022 and 2023, and the ninth official visit exchanged between Saudi and French leaders since 2015. It comes less than two years after Emmanuel Macron's December 2024 state visit to Riyadh, which produced a roadmap for strategic partnership and a memorandum establishing the Saudi-French Strategic Partnership Council. That council held its first meeting during this visit, chaired jointly by the two leaders.
The year carries additional weight: France and Saudi Arabia are marking the centenary of diplomatic relations.
Macron said the visit represents a significant milestone and reflects a commitment on both sides to expand cooperation across energy, technology, culture and defence. Patrick Maisonnave, France's ambassador to Saudi Arabia, described the relationship as moving from strong cooperation towards one grounded in shared objectives and long-term joint initiatives, citing Vision 2030 alongside French strengths in energy, infrastructure, innovation, artificial intelligence and education.
A French-Saudi Investment Roundtable, organised by the Saudi Ministry of Investment, was held in Paris on Monday, bringing together officials and chief executives for discussions on industrial partnerships, transport and logistics, artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure, with several agreements and memoranda expected. A CEOs' session focused on Public Investment Fund projects and major industrial ventures.
The Crown Prince also attended the closing ceremony of the Esports World Cup 2026 in Paris alongside Macron — the first edition held outside Saudi Arabia, after Riyadh hosted in 2024 and 2025.
The unavoidable context
None of this is happening in calm conditions.
According to the Élysée and diplomatic sources, the agenda for the leaders' talks includes the consequences of the US war on Iran, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, efforts to restore freedom of navigation through the Bab al-Mandab, and developments in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.
That backdrop reframes the technology cooperation rather than sitting beside it. A closed Hormuz and a contested Red Sea have turned energy security and trade-route resilience into the same question for both capitals — Saudi Arabia as a producer whose exports transit those waters, France as a European economy dependent on what comes through them.
Diversification, in that light, is not merely an economic preference. It is a hedge against a region where the sea lanes can be shut.
What would count as success
The scale of announcement is not in doubt. The harder question is what remains in eighteen months.
Saudi Arabia's stated ambition is technological sovereignty rather than technological consumption — to become a producer rather than a purchaser. That distinction is where most national technology strategies fail. Buying a 200-qubit machine is a procurement decision. Building the researchers, engineers and start-ups capable of using it competitively is a generational one, and Saudi Arabia acknowledges a shortage of quantum researchers relative to its ambitions.
The Pasqal–Eleven Ventures agreement is explicit about local talent development, which suggests Riyadh has understood the problem. Whether it is solved will be visible in ordinary places: how many Saudi PhDs are working on neutral-atom systems in three years, whether Pasqal Arabia employs Saudi engineers or French ones, and whether any company outside Aramco is running commercially useful workloads on these machines.
For France, the calculation is different but no less demanding. Saudi capital is now embedded in its flagship quantum company, and a Nasdaq listing is planned. The opportunity is to become a durable technology and investment partner in one of the world's largest economic transformation programmes. The risk, as with any relationship this asymmetric in capital terms, is becoming a supplier to it.
Saudi Investment Minister Fahad Al-Saif has put French foreign direct investment in the Kingdom at €16.3 billion, making France its fourth-largest source of FDI, with French companies present across more than eighteen sectors.
The measure of this week will not be the number of memoranda signed in Paris. It will be whether, in a few years, there is a quantum industry in the Kingdom that exists independently of the state visits that announced it.
