Briefs · Frontier Science
Washington Bets $2 Billion on Every Quantum Horse
Washington did not pick a quantum winner. It bought the whole field.
On 21 May, the Commerce Department signed letters of intent worth $2.013 billion in CHIPS Act funding. Nine companies will share the money. The goal is utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing.
IBM takes the lion’s share: $1 billion to build a quantum foundry for superconducting wafers. GlobalFoundries receives $375 million. Diraq gets $38 million. The other six, Atom Computing, D-Wave, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum and Rigetti, receive $100 million each.
The money is not a prize, but rather a portfolio. Superconducting, photonic, trapped-ion, neutral-atom and silicon-spin approaches are all funded at once.
These are letters of intent, not final awards. The cheques still need definitive agreements.
Still, the signal is a foundry-first future. America is building the factories before the machines exist.
Read the original at Nextgov/FCW
Summary in our own words. The original belongs to its publisher.