#computing

IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna in an interview
compared quantum to where AI chips were a
decade ago and said the new business could
generate billions of dollars a year in sales with high
profit margins by the mid-2030s.

Yep, quantum is almost here, like they've been telling us for years.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/quantum-computing-grants-ibm-rigetti-globalfoundries-7382e6be

Trump administration hopes to spur ‘a new era of American innovation,’ Commerce Secretary Lutnick says

By: Amrith Ramkumar and Heather Somerville |
Updated May 21, 2026 10:17 pm ET

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is awarding $2 billion in grants to nine quantum-computing companies in deals that include U.S. government equity stakes, the Commerce Department said.

The move accelerates the administration’s plans to boost the nascent industry, which has attracted a wave of investment from investors and businesses in recent months.

The department has agreed to give $1 billion of the package to International Business Machines IBM, a leader in the race to build computers that use quantum mechanics to solve problems much faster than traditional supercomputers. Coupled with advances in artificial intelligence, quantum computing has the potential to turbocharge scientific research, making it an economic and national-security priority for President Trump.

IBM and other companies are working to develop specialized chips for quantum computing, a focus for the government in its bid to spur domestic supply chains. IBM said it is investing $1 billion of its own cash alongside the award to set up what it said is the nation’s first specialized quantum chip manufacturing facility. The company is establishing a new business focused on the effort that will receive the government investment.

Shares of the company added 12%.

The chip maker GlobalFoundries GFS 14.92%increase; green up pointing triangle is receiving $375 million in funding and giving the government a roughly 1% stake in the company. It is also setting up a new business focused on quantum. The rest of the companies are expected to receive $100 million, except for the startup Diraq, which is slated to get $38 million.

Several companies pursuing various approaches to quantum are slated to be awarded funds, including the publicly traded firms D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing and Infleqtion.

The deals still need to be completed.

GlobalFoundries surged 15% on Thursday, while shares of the smaller publicly traded companies receiving funding—D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing and Infleqtion—added roughly 30% or more.

The funding for the quantum deals comes from the 2022 Chips and Science Act, which includes money for earlier-stage technology projects. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has overhauled the office, asking semiconductor companies to increase their domestic investments and taking a nearly 10% stake in Intel, which has seen shares surge since the unusual deal.

The government will receive a minority equity stake in each quantum company, adding to similar deals including the rare-earths magnet maker Vulcan Elements and the mining company MP Materials.

D-Wave said that all of its $100 million award would be an equity investment. It recently had a market value of more than $7 billion. Rigetti and Infleqtion said their deals would have a similar structure.

The department and many of the other quantum companies didn’t provide details about the exact size and structure of other equity stakes.

“The Trump administration is leading the world into a new era of American innovation,” Lutnick said in a statement.

The new funding comes as the administration works on an executive order focused on the industry, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported the department was talking to quantum companies about funding and equity stakes.

Some tech analysts have said the quantum sector and others are too risky for the government to make equity investments, but Lutnick has argued that the deals are structured so taxpayers will ultimately benefit. A senior Commerce Department official said the agency did so many different deals to spread out its bets, acknowledging that it could take years for them to pan out.

“Everybody is excited about quantum because it is the next big thing. A lot of the expectations and hopes have yet to be realized,” said Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a charity advocating for policies and systems to protect GPS satellites, signals, and users. One application of quantum has the potential to replace GPS, according to tech analysts.

IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna in an interview compared quantum to where AI chips were a decade ago and said the new business could generate billions of dollars a year in sales with high profit margins by the mid-2030s. The slate of deals “is a great statement of confidence that this industry is right around the corner within a couple of years,” Krishna said.

Krishna cited recent advanced simulations of proteins on IBM quantum computers that could aid dr-g discovery as an example of the sector’s progress.

Quantum executives said the amount of time it takes to make advancements in the field is falling thanks to the investments and research breakthroughs such as more powerful chips.

The other quantum startups expected to receive funding are Atom Computing, PsiQuantum and Quantinuum.

Last year, PsiQuantum raised $1 billion from investors including 1789 Capital, a venture firm in which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. 1789 also backs Vulcan Elements, the rare-earth magnet startup the government has also invested in.

Quantum is coming, just keep waiting. . .

https://www.barrons.com/articles/ibm-quantum-computing-research-nvidia-amd-0dd74344

By: Mackenzie Tatananni
Updated Jan 29, 2026, 12:26 pm EST / Original Jan 29, 2026, 12:01 am EST

It might seem natural to pit the capabilities of quantum computers—often touted as the next big technology—against today’s supercomputers. But scientists have a different, more collaborative vision for the future.

Rather than outright replacing classical machines, quantum systems will likely be built on top of existing architecture to enable more powerful computations.

This perspective was captured in new research from International Business Machines, which showed how classical graphics processing units, or GPUs, from leading chip makers could work alongside quantum processors to execute problems faster.

“It’s important for the world to see that quantum computers aren’t just these things that [will] replace your computers,” Jerry Chow, IBM’s chief technology officer of quantum-centric supercomputing, said in an interview with Barron’s. “They’re really part of the entire computing infrastructure.”

Two papers co-authored by IBM researchers detailing the results were posted to Cornell University’s arXiv, a research-sharing platform for papers that have yet to be peer-reviewed.

The first paper showed how GPUs from Advanced Micro Devices, contained within the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, could be combined with IBM’s Heron processor to model complex chemical systems and provide a 100-time speedup over central processing units, or CPUs.

“It’s a notoriously difficult problem for classical computers,” Chow explained. “But we know now, there’s a part of these chemistry problems which are best handled on the quantum computer.”

Follow-up work with Riken, a Japanese research institute, was showcased in the second paper. The study showed how the same chemical systems could be modeled on IBM quantum computers for an additional 20% increase in performance when using a new algorithmic approach on Nvidia chips.

“Overall, they’re all supporting the same narrative, that the future of computing is quantum-centric,” Chow said. As he sees it, it’s the next logical step in a continuous evolution of technology.

Classical GPUs have already proven their prowess at one type of math. The chips perform calculations by breaking large problems into thousands of simpler tasks that are processed simultaneously, through a method called parallel processing.

Meanwhile, quantum processors harness the properties of quantum mechanics, which makes them best suited for complex modeling tasks. This explains why most quantum research consists of some kind of modeling problem—and why quantum is expected to have an outsize impact in the areas of dr-g discovery and materials science.

Classical processors are “the technology behind everything that we see today with language models and training and inference and so forth,” according to Chow.

It’s impossible to rule out a distant future “where everything is all based off the same kind of technology,” he added. “But at least from what we’ve seen with how supercomputing has evolved in the last 10 to 15 years, it’s all about composable pieces.”

Jay Gambetta, who oversees IBM’s research effort, shared a similar view in an earlier interview with Barron’s. “We’re imagining a heterogeneous accelerating framework that connects quantum and classical compute,” Gambetta explained during a tour of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in October.

Much of IBM’s past research has incorporated hybrids of quantum and classical computing. In September, computers running on IBM’s Heron processor worked alongside bit-based machines to perform a bond trading problem.

One month earlier, IBM and AMD unveiled a formal collaboration to develop quantum-centric supercomputers. The partners indicated they were exploring ways for AMD chips to control errors on IBM’s quantum processors, which could advance IBM’s efforts to develop fault-tolerant quantum computers by the end of the decade.

Crucially, the latest results demonstrate that real-world applications of quantum computers are just a step away.

“We have a number of partners who already have clusters of supercomputers that they know how to access,” Chow said. “To them, it’s like, ‘Now I have the keys to a brand-new car, let me see what I can do with it and how I can work it in with what I’ve been doing.’”

IBM shares climbed 6.8% on Thursday, bolstered by strong quarterly earnings. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 1.9%. So far this year, IBM has gained 6.1%, outstripping a 0.7% gain for the index.