Washington Stakes $2 Billion and an Ownership Cut in America’s Quantum Race, With IBM as the Anchor

By JBizNews Desk

WASHINGTON — May 22, 2026

The federal government is no longer just funding America’s quantum computing industry. It is buying into it.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced Thursday that the U.S. Department of Commerce has signed letters of intent to provide more than $2 billion in federal incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act to nine quantum computing companies — and, in exchange, Washington will take minority, non-controlling equity stakes in each recipient.

The structure mirrors the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive industrial-policy model already used with Intel Corp. and MP Materials, transforming the federal government from grant provider into direct shareholder across industries deemed strategically critical to U.S. national security and technological leadership.

At the center of Thursday’s package is IBM Corp., which will receive $1 billion to launch what the company describes as America’s first purpose-built quantum chip foundry.

The new entity, named Anderon, will be headquartered in Albany, New York, and operate as a 300-millimeter quantum wafer manufacturing facility designed to serve both IBM and external industry customers developing next-generation quantum hardware.

IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said the project would position the United States at the center of the emerging global quantum supply chain while accelerating domestic manufacturing capacity.

“Anderon will be well-positioned to fuel America’s fast-growing quantum technology industry,” Krishna said Thursday.

IBM is matching the federal incentive dollar-for-dollar, committing another $1 billion in cash alongside intellectual property, infrastructure assets and staffing commitments. IBM shares rose roughly 4% in early trading following the announcement.

The remaining federal funding will be distributed across a broad range of quantum architectures and technologies, reflecting Washington’s strategy of diversifying bets across competing approaches to quantum computing.

GlobalFoundries is slated to receive approximately $375 million to establish a secure domestic quantum foundry capable of manufacturing chips across multiple architectures, including superconducting, trapped-ion, photonic, silicon-spin and topological systems.

Additional awards include up to $100 million each for D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, Infleqtion, Atom Computing, PsiQuantum, and Quantinuum.

The smallest disclosed allocation — roughly $38 million — will go to Australian-American startup Diraq.

Commerce officials said the funding will target some of the industry’s most difficult engineering bottlenecks, including quantum error correction, cryogenic integration, photonic packaging and large-scale qubit control systems.

Those technical hurdles remain the primary obstacle preventing quantum computing from moving from experimental research into commercially scalable machines.

Markets reacted immediately.

Shares of D-Wave Quantum surged roughly 19% in premarket trading, while Rigetti Computing gained 15%. IonQ, which was not included in Thursday’s funding package, climbed 9% on expectations of broader sector support.

Smaller speculative quantum names rallied sharply as well, with Arqit Quantum jumping more than 25% and Quantum Computing Inc. gaining nearly 20%.

The political framing from the administration was unmistakable.

“With today’s CHIPS Research and Development investments in quantum computing, the Trump administration is leading the world into a new era of American innovation,” Lutnick said.

He described the initiative as critical for securing domestic manufacturing, protecting U.S. technological leadership and creating high-paying American jobs tied to advanced computing infrastructure.

The announcement further expands the administration’s evolving industrial strategy, which increasingly blends subsidies, tariffs, direct investment and federal ownership stakes across industries viewed as strategically vital.

Last year, the government converted nearly $9 billion in Intel support into an equity position approaching 10% of the semiconductor giant.

That precedent now appears to be extending into quantum hardware.

The economic stakes behind Washington’s move are potentially enormous, though still highly speculative.

IBM estimates the quantum industry could generate as much as $850 billion in economic value globally by 2040.

Consulting firm McKinsey & Company has projected that sectors including automotive manufacturing, chemicals, financial services and life sciences could collectively unlock more than $1.3 trillion in value from quantum applications by 2035.

But the industry remains far from commercial maturity.

Quantum systems are extraordinarily sensitive to environmental disruption, including heat, electromagnetic interference and vibration. No company receiving Thursday’s funding has yet demonstrated a commercially practical, fully fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of outperforming conventional systems at scale.

What Thursday’s announcement changes is not the underlying physics challenge.

It changes the capital structure around the companies trying to solve it.

By taking direct equity stakes alongside providing billions in funding, Washington is signaling to private investors that the federal government intends to remain deeply embedded in the future of quantum computing — both financially and strategically.

The Commerce Department has not yet disclosed the exact size of the ownership stakes it will receive in each company, and the agreements still require finalization.

But the broader direction is increasingly clear.

After semiconductors, rare earths and energy infrastructure, quantum computing has now joined the growing list of industries Washington considers too strategically important to leave entirely to market forces or foreign supply chains.

For IBM, Anderon and the broader quantum sector, Thursday’s announcement marks the beginning of a far more consequential phase: not simply proving the science works, but proving that America intends to own the industrial foundation beneath it.