Washington Bought Into Quantum Computing – Crypto Should Be Paying Attention

The US Department of Commerce said on May 21 that it had signed letters of intent to put $2.013 billion into nine quantum computing companies in exchange for minority, non-controlling equity stakes, and over the past two weeks those letters have started converting into signed contracts.

D-Wave finalized its agreement on September 9 for up to $100 million in CHIPS and Science Act funding, following Quantinuum's own finalized pact a day earlier and a similar deal with Rigetti. The letters-of-intent-to-contract pipeline is now working through the rest of the list.

The money splits two ways. Two companies are being funded to build the physical manufacturing base the industry lacks: GlobalFoundries is getting $375 million to build a secure domestic quantum foundry that can fabricate chips across five different quantum modalities, and IBM is getting $1 billion, more than the other eight combined, to spin up a dedicated quantum foundry subsidiary producing quantum-grade superconducting wafers. The remaining seven companies are computing firms spanning nearly every architecture competing to build a useful quantum computer: Atom Computing and Infleqtion ($100 million each, neutral-atom systems), D-Wave ($100 million, annealing and gate-model superconducting), Quantinuum ($100 million, trapped-ion), Rigetti (up to $100 million, superconducting), PsiQuantum ($100 million, photonic) and Diraq (up to $38 million, silicon spin).