6 stories
Show: Summaries / Headlines only
Governments committed $12.7 billion to quantum technology in 2025 and venture investors $4.9 billion, against a $1.9 billion market. Spin-offs combine both kinds of money. Companies that listed in 2026 have yet to show a shorter path to profit.
Commerce holds stakes in five companies through its CHIPS quantum awards and releases award money as they meet milestones. DOE and DARPA pay for demonstrated or verified progress. The government is now an owner as well as a funder.
About $200 million is new funding tied to the final stage of DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative. The rest is a proposed loan to PsiQuantum that the company said is conditional and not guaranteed.
The four join Microsoft and PsiQuantum in Stage C, where government evaluators test whether a proposed utility-scale machine can be built as designed. Of the four, only Diraq disclosed its initial funding, $51 million for the next year.
For D-Wave, Rigetti, and Quantinuum, Commerce makes 44% to 56% of each $100 million available at the start and releases the remainder as the companies meet project milestones over up to five years.
PsiQuantum signed a $125 million expanded DARPA agreement in July. Like Microsoft, it entered the final stage of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative through US2QC, a related program, without passing through the initiative's first two stages.
