U.S. to Invest $2B in Nine Quantum Firms, Taking Stakes

The Commerce Department plans to award $2 billion to nine quantum computing firms and to take minority equity stakes in each instead of providing traditional grants. The funds will be structured as ownership positions across multiple hardware approaches in the quantum industry.

Under the proposal, IBM would receive $1 billion and GlobalFoundries $375 million. D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing and Infleqtion are slated to receive about $100 million each, and Diraq is expected to receive roughly $38 million. The department has not released the full list of recipients or final contract documents.

The investments cover a range of hardware approaches: superconducting qubits at IBM and Rigetti, quantum annealing at D-Wave, neutral-atom systems at Infleqtion, silicon spin qubits at Diraq, and chip fabrication support at GlobalFoundries. Commerce officials designed the set of stakes to span competing technical paths where no single architecture has become dominant.

The structure follows an earlier federal conversion of CHIPS Act funding into an equity position in a major chip company. That prior conversion involved roughly $5.7 billion in government funding that was converted into company shares, a position later valued substantially higher.

U.S. equity markets reacted in premarket trading to the announcement. Shares of the directly listed recipients moved higher, with IBM, GlobalFoundries, D-Wave, Rigetti and Infleqtion among the stocks that registered gains.

Supporters of the equity approach say it lets taxpayers share financial upside if commercial quantum hardware and services scale. Critics caution that government ownership stakes in private firms could blur lines between regulation and market participation and raise questions about how the government will manage governance and exit rights.

Key contract terms such as voting rights, lockup periods and exit provisions have not been disclosed. Those terms will determine whether the funding functions more like a traditional government grant or a venture-style investment vehicle.

Michael Osborne, chief technology officer of IBM Quantum Safe, cautioned that “you need these very high quality qubits” and noted public estimates often depend on assumptions about architecture, circuit depth and the integration of classical and quantum resources.

Quantum computing development intersects with concerns about cryptography and digital security. Advanced quantum machines could threaten current encryption methods, and some blockchain networks have already conducted tests of quantum-resilience measures. Industry participants and security researchers continue to debate timelines for when quantum devices could pose concrete risks to encryption.

The Commerce Department’s equity approach will proceed as contract terms are finalized and recipients are confirmed. Details on governance, liquidity and exit mechanisms will shape the financial and policy outcomes of converting federal R&D funding into minority ownership across the quantum industry.