Caught between cooperation and competition: EU–China research cooperation in artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and semiconductors

As China’s research system has grown and become more internationally connected, collaboration between Chinese and European researchers has deepened across a wide range of scientific fields. In recent years, however, the political context in which such cooperation takes place has changed significantly. Science and technology have become increasingly intertwined with concerns over competitiveness, economic security, strategic dependencies, and the transfer of knowledge with potential military applications.

These concerns are particularly pronounced in technologies considered strategically important for Europe’s economic and technological security. Artificial intelligence (AI), advanced semiconductors, and quantum technologies are among the areas the EU has singled out for particular attention because of their transformative potential and possible civil-military applications. As the EU progressively incorporates research security into its wider economic security agenda, European policymakers face the challenge of distinguishing between collaborations that pose genuine security risks and those that remain important for Europe’s own scientific and technological capacity.

Against this backdrop, this study examines how EU–China scientific collaboration evolved between 2015 and 2025 in AI, semiconductors, and quantum technologies. This study draws on a new dataset of joint scientific publications across three research areas, which traces the evolution of research ties, identifies the leading countries and institutions involved, and maps the main areas of collaboration within each technology field, as well as CEIAS’s pre-existing research under the China-Europe Academic Engagement Tracker.

Executive summary:

1. EU–China research cooperation in critical technologies is extensive and expanding. Between 2015 and 2025, researchers affiliated with EU and Chinese institutions jointly produced 34,161 publications in artificial intelligence (AI), 9,706 in quantum technologies, and 43,684 in semiconductors. Cooperation is not confined to a small number of research institutions or countries; Chinese partners feature in research conducted across all 27 EU member states, with particularly extensive links involving Europe’s leading research ecosystems.
2. EU–China research cooperation in critical technologies is extensive and expanding. Between 2015 and 2025, researchers affiliated with EU and Chinese institutions jointly produced 34,161 publications in artificial intelligence (AI), 9,706 in quantum technologies, and 43,684 in semiconductors. Cooperation is not confined to a small number of research institutions or countries; Chinese partners feature in research conducted across all 27 EU member states, with particularly extensive links involving Europe’s leading research ecosystems.
3. The continuously expanding role of China in EU’s critical tech research coupled with the pervasive role of military-linked Chinese research institutions in this cooperation suggests that EU’s early efforts to adopt research security practices has not yet had significant impact on pursuit of collaborations with Chinese scientists affiliated with higher-risk Chinese research institutions.
4. China’s role in European critical technologies research has grown significantly over the past decade. Between 2015 and 2025, the volume of produced research output grew more than sixfold in AI and nearly doubled in quantum and semiconductors. At the same time, cooperation with Chinese researchers has also become more frequent. While in 2015, co-authorships with Chinese researchers accounted for 2.4% of all AI research output in the EU, in 2025 that share grew to 8.1% of all outputs. In quantum technologies, the corresponding share increased from 6.9% to 11.6%, while in semiconductors it rose from 4.5% to 12.7%.
5. Cooperation is concentrated in Europe’s strongest research ecosystems, but several smaller countries and institutions show particularly high levels of engagement. Germany is the largest European contributor to EU–China cooperation across all three critical research fields, while France, Italy, Sweden, Spain and other major research systems also feature prominently. At the institutional level, however, the picture is more dispersed: Nordic universities are particularly prominent in AI, while Swedish, Spanish and Danish institutions appear among the most active in quantum research. In semiconductors, the most active European research organizations cooperating with China include universities from France, Sweden and Denmark.
6. EU–China AI research is concentrated in the technical foundations of modern AI. Machine and statistical learning theory and classical algorithms account for the largest share of joint research, followed by deep-learning architecture, training methods and representation learning, followed by research on data centric AI and synthetic data.
7. Quantum cooperation is concentrated predominantly in fundamental and enabling technologies. Quantum materials and qubit platforms account for the largest shares of joint publications, followed by quantum devices and hardware engineering, and quantum information theory.
8. Semiconductor cooperation is concentrated upstream in the technology value chain, particularly in materials, photonics and device technologies. Semiconductor materials constitute the largest research category, followed by optoelectronics and photonic integrated circuits, with a further substantial body of work addressing manufacturing processes such as lithography, etching, deposition and fabrication flows.
9. A large majority of EU–China research involves Chinese institutions with documented links to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) or China’s military-industrial complex. Overall, 68.8% of EU–China AI publications, 72.0% of quantum publications and 73.9% of semiconductor publications involved at least one Chinese institution tied to the Chinese military-civil fusion program or otherwise engaged with the PLA.
10. The Seven Sons of National Defense represent a particularly sensitive part of this cooperation. The seven universities are deeply embedded in China’s defense research system and are among the country’s most important research institutions in areas such as aerospace, electronics, maritime technologies and advanced engineering. European researchers have jointly produced at least 3,176 AI publications, 747 quantum publications and 4,396 semiconductor publications with researchers affiliated with the Seven Sons of National Defense universities during the period examined.
11. For most academic research on cutting-edge technologies, it is difficult to predict dual-use potential. This is especially true for fundamental research, where the eventual fields of application are often not known when the research begins. Only a few publications in the dataset are explicitly classified as having military use. Yet technologies such as computer vision, biometric recognition, autonomous systems, quantum sensing and communications, advanced semiconductor materials and photonics can support both civilian and military applications. Examples identified in the research include AI-based control methods relevant to hypersonic flight control, facial recognition, satellite imagery analysis, and UAV swarms; quantum technologies for secure communications and radar sensing; and semiconductor and photonic technologies relevant to radar systems, LiDAR, and radiation detection.
12. Chinese commercial actors, particularly Huawei, also participate in EU–China academic cooperation on critical technologies. Huawei appears as an author affiliation in 668 AI-related and 161 semiconductor-related publications in the dataset. Huawei is also active in funding research projects and development of research infrastructure in Europe. Not only has it established two in-house research and development (R&D) centers in Belgium, but it has also provided funding for research at the University of Augsburg (Germany) into recognition of human emotion from voice, speech and facial expressions, which has potential applications for human rights suppression in China, and also funded the establishment of a microelectronics research lab at Italy’s University of Pavia.
13. A substantial proportion of collaboration takes place through broader international networks. 48.3% of EU–China AI publications, 50.9% of quantum publications, and 44.0% of semiconductor publications involve at least one additional institution outside the EU and China. Researchers therefore frequently work with Chinese partners alongside institutions from the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. This structure of EU–China research cooperation makes risk assessment more complex than a simple bilateral screening model suggests. Thus, efficient research security requires not just improving the EU’s own screening capacity, but also better coordination of policies and enforcement among like-minded partners that also participate in research with China.
14. Funding patterns reveal a significant asymmetry in the financial foundations of EU–China research cooperation. Exclusive Chinese funding is acknowledged in 29.4% of AI publications, 20.1% of quantum publications, and 29.9% of semiconductor publications, compared with only 4.5%, 6.8%, and 6.7% respectively for exclusively EU-funded research. Chinese funding is particularly prominent through the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), while more strategically oriented programs such as the National Key Research and Development Program also feature prominently. Some joint research is also funded through member-state schemes (either separately or jointly with China). Although the EU Commission has recently barred Chinese universities from working on some Horizon Europe-funded critical tech projects, member-state-level funding presents a significant gap in Europe’s research security framework.