On January 1, 2023, the QCIHungary project commenced under the European Commission’s Digital Europe Programme. According to the project website, the initiative aimed to lay the foundations of a national quantum communication infrastructure in Hungary, with the eventual goal of participating in the creation of a larger pan-European quantum network.
Four institutions formed the consortium: the Governmental Agency for IT Development (KIFÜ) as consortium leader, alongside the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Eötvös Loránd University, and the Wigner Research Centre for Physics. The project was scheduled to run through June 30, 2025.
Plans called for connecting Budapest with three cities in different directions (Győr, Nagykanizsa, and Szeged), with potential future cross-border connections to Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Romania. A metropolitan network within Budapest was also envisioned. The backbone was to be constructed from commercially available quantum key distribution (QKD) systems, with additional work on continuous variable and entanglement-based QKD over optical fibers, free-space quantum links, and the installation of a quantum-capable ground station.