Nine CHIPS Act letters of intent, $1bn for IBM, and a government cap table that now includes most of the publicly traded quantum names.
The US Department of Commerce has signed nine letters of intent to provide $2.013bn in CHIPS Act funding to quantum computing companies, in exchange for federal equity stakes in each recipient.
The announcement, released by NIST on Wednesday, formalises a plan first reported by the Wall Street Journal and represents the largest single quantum-industry intervention by the US government to date.
IBM is the headline recipient with roughly $1bn, paired with a company commitment to invest a further $1bn of its own into a domestic quantum chip-manufacturing facility. GlobalFoundries, IBM’s foundry partner, is in for about $375m. Three publicly traded pure-play quantum companies, D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing and Infleqtion, are each expected to receive roughly $100m. Silicon-spin startup Diraq is slated for up to $38m.
The mechanism is what makes the package unusual. The government is taking equity stakes alongside each grant, in a structure that echoes the equity component the Trump administration secured in the Intel CHIPS award last year. Quantum stocks moved sharply on the news, with publicly traded recipients rising between 7% and 21% in premarket trading.
