US issues $2B+ in grants to IBM, others for quantum computing initiatives

The US Commerce Department will issue $2.013 billion in grants to IBM Corp., GlobalFoundries Inc. and seven other tech firms to finance quantum computing initiatives.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the US government will receive shares in exchange for the funding. According to the paper, the stock that GlobalFoundries is set to issue will amount to an approximately 1% stake. The size of the stakes that the government will take in the eight other participating companies was not disclosed.

Shares of IBM and GlobalFoundries jumped more than 12% on the news.

Nearly half the funds, or $1 billion, will go to IBM, which plans to match the investment. The company will use the capital to build a new quantum chip manufacturing business called Anderon. The venture will build a foundry capable of making 300-millimeter quantum wafers (pictured).

Anderon will initially focus on producing wafers for superconducting quantum computers. Such machines implement qubits using transistors made of superconducting materials. The transistors are cooled to near absolute zero, which gives rise to quantum mechanical phenomena known as Cooper pairs. Electrons travel through the circuits in pairs rather than one at a time like in a conventional processor.

In the long term, Anderon will expand its focus beyond superconducting qubits to the competing circuit architectures used by quantum computer markets. Those architectures are also a focus of the other companies that are set to receive grants from the Commerce Department.

Two of the participants, Atom Computing Inc. and Infleqtion Inc., make quantum computers that use neutral atoms as qubits. A neutral atom is an atom that doesn’t possess an electric charge. The quantum computers made by Atom Computing and Infleqtion use lasers to encode data into such particles. The companies are each set to receive $100 million in federal incentives.

PsiQuantum Inc., which will receive the same sum, uses qubits made of light rather than neutral atoms. Another participating company called Quantinuum Inc. makes quantum processors based on a trapped ion design. The machine’s qubits are ions, atoms that possess an electric charge. 

The second largest grant after the one won by IBM will go to GlobalFoundries. The company, which operates legacy node fabs, will receive $375 million to launch a new quantum chip manufacturing business. The business will make quantum chips based on superconducting, trapped ion and photonic designs. GlobalFoundries also plans to support other architectures.

The company is already a major supplier of cryogenic CMOS chips. Such processors are used to encode data into a quantum computer’s qubits, coordinate how they process the data and read the results. Additionally, GlobalFoundries makes photonic components for PsiQuantum’s light-powered quantum processors.

“The hardware is moving from lab-scale to industrial scale, and that transition can only happen inside an advanced semiconductor manufacturing environment,” said GlobalFoundries Chief Technology Officer Gregg Bartlett.

The announcement of the quantum grants comes less than a year after the US government took a 10% stake in Intel Corp. The company’s research unit is developing quantum chips based on a design known as a silicon spin qubit architecture. It implements qubits using quantum dots, semiconducting nanocrystals that are also used to make displays and solar panels.

Image: IBM