What happened
The US Department of Commerce and IBM announced a Letter of Intent to establish Anderon, America's first pure-play quantum chip foundry, in Albany, New York. This initiative receives $1 billion in CHIPS incentives from the Department of Commerce and $1 billion in cash from IBM, forming the largest allocation within a broader $2 billion CHIPS quantum package. This package distributes funds across nine companies, including $375 million for GlobalFoundries, and $100 million each for D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, Infleqtion, Atom Computing, PsiQuantum, and Quantinuum, with Diraq receiving $38 million. Anderon will operate as a standalone 300mm quantum wafer fabrication facility, initially supporting superconducting qubits.
Why it matters
US quantum industrial policy now prioritises 300mm superconducting silicon manufacturing, concentrating capital in IBM's Anderon foundry. This funding structure creates a two-tier quantum ecosystem: IBM gains access to production-grade fabrication infrastructure, while competing modalities receive venture-scale investments. For platform engineers and procurement teams, this means a clear manufacturing hierarchy, where 300mm facilities offer 30 times faster device output, relegating 200mm environments to early-stage research. This follows recent large-scale semiconductor investments, such as Elon Musk's $20 billion TeraFab project.
