Jun. 12 at 6:19 PM
$IBM Last month, the United States Commerce Department signed letters of intent to award just over
$2 billion to nine quantum computing companies building the machines that break the cryptography defending Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the cryptography that the rest of the internet runs on.
These are not simply research grants. They represent industrial policy for manufacturing scale, and an investment in long-term equity outcomes where the government hopes to turn a profit. IBM (IBM) is getting
$1B to stand up a quantum-grade superconducting wafer foundry. GlobalFoundries (GFS) is getting
$375M for a multi-architecture fab. The remaining
$636M is split across seven companies actually building quantum computers, across superconducting, trapped ion, photonic and neutral-atom modalities.
