Not all US federal government spending is shrinking. Amid layoffs at several federal agencies, the ending of some government funding programs, and the chaos created by tariffs, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is expanding a key quantum computing research program that will involve new funding for several domestic and foreign companies.
DARPA in a statement said that 18 quantum computing companies from around the world have been selected for the first stage of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), a program that kicked off last summer, and is aimed at validating the ability of a quantum computing approach to achieve “utility-scale operation”--its computational value exceeding its cost–by 2033.
The QBI is set up as a three-stage program, with companies accepted for “Stage A” earning $1 million each for detailing their concepts. Canadian start-up Nord Quantique, one of the firms chosen for Stage A, said in a statement, “Those then moving on to Stage B will receive up to $USD 15 million to focus on a baseline R&D plan. And finally, those selected for Stage C may receive up to $USD 300 million if utility scale quantum computers can be built based on their design, and operate as intended.”
Nord Quantique CEO Dr. Julien Camirand Lemyre further told Fierce Electronics during a conference call convened by the company to discuss the announcement that the change in presidential administrations and changes in government funding decisions between the QBI’s kick-off last year and this week’s news have not affected the program thus far. “With respect to the new administration, from our perspective, DARPA has fulfilled this engagement in supporting companies in entering Phase A of the program, so [the changes at the federal level] have had no impact in the situation up to now.”
Indeed, since President Trump took office in January, DARPA's QBI announcement is one of the first public moves by a federal agency to endorse ongoing government investment in quantum computing even as spending cuts and layoffs occur elsewhere across the US government. The Biden Administration was viewed as an active supporter of the industry, although the federal government's financial backing of the sector began during the first Trump Administration with the passage of 2018's National Quantum Initiative Act.
Lemyre added that the new funding will help Nord Quantique “mainly in accelerating our activities, and supporting the growing of our technology,” and that the company envisions “useful quantum computers solving like some classes of problems by the end of the decade,” a few years ahead of the QBI’s stated goal. He also said the DARPA program will help keep North America as a whole a competitive player in the global quantum computing ecosystem.
Broomfield, Colorado-based Quantinuum also was chosen for the QBI, and Quantinuum President and CEO Dr. Rajeeb Hazra said in a statement, “We are honored to collaborate with DARPA and look forward to working closely with their test and evaluation team as they assess our roadmap and technological approach. With our roadmap firmly on track, we are confident in our ability to deliver on DARPA’s objectives for QBI.”
Microsoft and Nvidia also collaborate with Quantinuum in its Stage A effort, the statement added. Hazra recently joined Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on-stage at Nvidia’s GTC event Quantum Day session to discuss the technology’s prospects.
DARPA initially listed 15 of the 18 companies chosen for the QBI (with the remaining three due to be named at a later date), along with the qubit technology at the core of each firm’s approach:
- Alice & Bob — Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Paris, France (superconducting cat qubits)
- Atlantic Quantum — Cambridge, Massachusetts (fluxonium qubits with co-located cryogenic controls)
- Atom Computing — Boulder, Colorado (scalable arrays of neutral atoms)
- Diraq — Sydney, Australia, with operations in Palo Alto, California, and Boston, Massachusetts (silicon CMOS spin qubits)
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise — Houston, Texas (superconducting qubits with advanced fabrication)
- IBM — Yorktown Heights, NY (quantum computing with modular superconducting processors)
- IonQ — College Park, Maryland (trapped-ion quantum computing)
- Nord Quantique — Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada (superconducting qubits with bosonic error correction)
- Oxford Ionics — Oxford, UK and Boulder, Colorado (trapped-ions)
- Photonic Inc. — Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (optically-linked silicon spin qubits)
- Quantinuum — Broomfield, Colorado (trapped-ion quantum charged coupled device (QCCD) architecture)
- Quantum Motion — London, UK (MOS-based silicon spin qubits)
- Rigetti Computing — Berkeley, California (superconducting tunable transmon qubits)
- Silicon Quantum Computing Pty. Ltd. — Sydney, Australia (precision atom qubits in silicon)
- Xanadu — Toronto, Canada (photonic quantum computing)
"We selected these companies for Stage A following a review of their written abstracts and daylong oral presentations before a team of U.S. quantum experts to determine whether their proposed concepts might be able to reach industrial utility," said Joe Altepeter, DARPA QBI program manager, in a statement. "For the chosen companies, now the real work begins. Stage A is a six-month sprint in which they’ll provide comprehensive technical details of their concepts to show that they hold water and could plausibly lead to a transformative, fault-tolerant quantum computer in under 10 years."
Companies that successfully complete Stage A will move to a year-long Stage B, during which DARPA will rigorously examine their research and development approach, followed by a final Stage C where the QBI independent verification and validation (IV&V) team will test the companies' computer hardware.
"Those who make it through Stages A and B will enter the final portion of the program, Stage C, where a full-size IV&V team will conduct real-time, rigorous evaluation of the components, subsystems, and algorithms – everything that goes into building a fault-tolerant quantum computer for real,” Altepeter said. “And we’ll do all these evaluations without slowing the companies down."
DARPA recently announced that Microsoft and PsiQuantum are entering the third and final phase of the Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program, a pilot effort that was expanded to become QBI. The final phase of the US2QC has the same technical goals as the newly-expanded QBI, DARPA said.