D-Wave Quantum just landed one of the more consequential checks a quantum computing company has ever received from Uncle Sam. The company signed a Letter of Intent with the US Department of Commerce for up to $100 million in funding under the CHIPS and Science Act, placing it among a select group of quantum firms tapped to receive federal backing.
The deal is part of a roughly $2 billion allocation spread across nine quantum computing companies, a signal that Washington views quantum technology with the same strategic urgency it once reserved for semiconductors.
What the money buys
The $100 million is earmarked primarily for accelerating R&D at D-Wave’s new facility in Boca Raton, Florida, along with existing operations in New Haven, Connecticut, and Burnaby, British Columbia.
The strategic targets are ambitious: a 100,000-qubit annealing system and a 10,000-qubit gate-model system. To put that in perspective, D-Wave’s current generation annealing processors run at around 5,000 qubits. The company is essentially trying to scale its hardware by a factor of 20.
