The United States government just made its biggest single bet on quantum computing. The Trump administration has agreed to take $2 billion in equity stakes across nine quantum-computing companies, including a new IBM venture, as part of its broader push to shore up the domestic supply chain and counter China in crucial sectors. The US Department of Commerce is awarding $2 billion to American quantum-computing companies — half of which will go to IBM — to bolster the buildout of supercomputers that could solve some of the world's most pressing problems. The announcement marks a historic inflection point: quantum computing has moved from an academic curiosity to a declared national security priority, with Washington treating it with the same strategic urgency once reserved for semiconductors.
IBM Gets $1 Billion — and Builds America's First Quantum Foundry
IBM is expected to receive the largest share of the package at about $1 billion. A $1 billion "incentive" from the Department of Commerce would support the research and development efforts of a new IBM company called Anderon — described as "America's first pure-play quantum foundry." IBM will also invest another $1 billion of its own capital in Anderon, matching the government's contribution dollar-for-dollar and bringing the total investment in the new facility to $2 billion. The foundry is designed to manufacture the specialised chips that quantum computers require — components that are currently sourced from a fragile, globally distributed supply chain with significant exposure to China. A domestic quantum chip manufacturing capability has long been identified by defence and intelligence agencies as a critical strategic gap.
GlobalFoundries, D-Wave, Rigetti and the Wider Ecosystem
IBM's Anderon is the centrepiece, but the investment is designed to build an entire domestic ecosystem. Contract chipmaker GlobalFoundries would get $375 million to build a domestic factory capable of producing components for several different types of quantum machines. Other recipients are expected to include D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, Quantinuum, and Infleqtion, with each company potentially receiving around $100 million. Australian quantum startup Diraq could receive about $38 million.
The inclusion of D-Wave and Rigetti is notable. Both are publicly traded companies with dramatically different technical approaches to quantum computing — D-Wave uses quantum annealing, while Rigetti pursues superconducting gate-based quantum processors — suggesting the government is deliberately funding multiple competing architectures rather than betting exclusively on one technology. The reported investments expand Washington's strategy of backing domestic supply-chain and strategic technology companies as the U.S. seeks to strengthen its position against China in advanced computing sectors. For the government's full investment criteria, funding terms, and equity stake structure, the U.S. Department of Commerce publishes all CHIPS and Science Act and strategic technology investment announcements on its official website.
The Economic Prize: $850 Billion by 2040
The scale of the government's investment reflects the scale of the prize. IBM estimates that quantum computing will generate up to $850 billion in economic value by 2040. McKinsey & Company, meanwhile, thinks that just four industries — automotive, chemicals, financial services, and life sciences — stand to gain up to $1.3 trillion in value by 2035 from quantum computing. The use cases span an extraordinary range: recent technological breakthroughs have deepened investor interest in quantum computing's potential to speed up processes ranging from drug discovery to financial modelling and cryptography. In cryptography specifically, the stakes are existential — a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break the RSA and elliptic-curve encryption that underpins virtually all internet security today, making the race to build fault-tolerant quantum hardware simultaneously an economic competition and a national security imperative.
Equity Stakes: A New Model of Industrial Policy
The structure of the investment — equity stakes rather than grants — represents a meaningful evolution in how the U.S. government funds strategic technology. Traditional R&D grants give companies cash in exchange for deliverables and intellectual property disclosures. Equity stakes give taxpayers a financial return if the companies succeed, while also giving the government a governance voice in how recipients operate. The investments underscore how quantum computing has moved from an academic and experimental field into a geopolitical and industrial priority. This approach mirrors the equity model used in the UK and Australian government quantum programmes, and signals that Washington is treating quantum computing the same way it treated semiconductors under the CHIPS Act — as infrastructure too strategically important to leave entirely to private markets.
China Competition Is the Explicit Driver
The announcement was framed explicitly around the U.S.-China technology competition. China has been running a parallel quantum computing investment programme for years, with state-backed researchers at institutions including the University of Science and Technology of China producing several high-profile quantum milestones — including the Jiuzhang photonic quantum computer and Zuchongzhi superconducting processor. The move comes amid growing investment into quantum computing firms, which are racing to build computers that harness quantum mechanics to solve problems beyond the ability of even the most advanced computers. The race to build fault-tolerant, commercially useful quantum computers is now being fought on two fronts simultaneously: in the laboratory, where physics determines what is possible, and in Washington and Beijing, where geopolitics determines who gets there first. America's $2 billion quantum bet is an acknowledgement that the laboratory competition alone is no longer sufficient.