Latest / Quickly Quantum / Washington Buys a Stake in the Quantum Race — September 12, 2026
Transcript
- Did the U.S. government just become a shareholder in quantum computing? That's the tension running through this entire week, and it's where we're starting today. Before that, in the headlines: a Japanese pioneer just walked away from the exact hardware it helped invent, a Connecticut university landed a physicist who spent years at Brookhaven National Lab, and a small Quebec company is now supplying cryogenic amplifiers to the Canadian government. Welcome back to Quickly Quantum, your daily brief on the quantum frontier. It's Saturday, September 12, 2026, and this is our weekly recap — the full arc of the week, including a few stories that slipped past weekday coverage. Let's get into it. We covered this one earlier in the week, so here's the tightened-up version. The Commerce Department finalized one hundred million dollars in CHIPS Act research-and-development awards apiece to D-Wave, Rigetti, and Quantinuum — three of the field's best-known hardware makers — and as a condition of taking that money, Washington took minority, non-controlling equity stakes in all three. That's real money, tied to real conditions, going into three of the field's most recognizable names all in the same stretch of the calendar. Now, the honest caveat: nobody's disclosed what percentage Commerce actually took in any of the three companies, and the reporting suggests Quantinuum's terms may not even match D-Wave's or Rigetti's. The funding is also milestone-gated, meaning it can be pulled if targets slip. So don't picture Washington running these companies day to day — the stakes are minority and conditional. But it's part of a bigger pattern: Commerce also finalized a separate hundred-million-dollar award with PsiQuantum this week, which we'll get to later in this recap. Put together, it's a government trying to build a domestic quantum manufacturing base the way it once approached chips. IonQ's Investor Day also made news this week, so quick refresher: the company built the day around three things — a new hardware platform called Superion 256, a one point eight billion dollar acquisition of SkyWater Foundry to bring chip manufacturing in-house, and a fault-tolerant resource estimate for breaking Bitcoin's elliptic-curve cryptography, the math that secures nearly every Bitcoin wallet today. That last number is exactly the kind that makes headlines and moves a stock, and it's worth sitting with the tension there — IonQ is simultaneously the source of this estimate, the science behind it, and the company whose share price jumps every time 'quantum' and 'Bitcoin' land in the same sentence. Worth remembering: resource estimates like this only hold up if future error-correction — the technique that fixes mistakes in fragile qubits — performs as assumed, and nobody has demonstrated an actual attack. This is a roadmap number, not a working exploit. But the vertical-integration move, owning your own foundry, echoes the same manufacturing instinct we just saw from Commerce funding D-Wave, Rigetti, and Quantinuum. NEC's decision to halt its superconducting quantum hardware program also broke this week — quick version: this is the company that built the world's first superconducting solid-state qubit back in nineteen ninety-nine, and it's now stepping away from building physical, gate-based quantum computers, citing commercialization timelines that are simply too long to justify the spend. NEC isn't leaving quantum altogether, though — it's pivoting to quantum annealing, a narrower optimization-focused approach, and to classical emulation, software that mimics quantum behavior on ordinary computers. Call it a hardware retreat, not an exit. Still, it's a useful counterweight to everything else this week: while Washington writes hundred-million-dollar checks to keep D-Wave, Rigetti, and Quantinuum building physical qubits, one of the field's actual pioneers looked at its own timeline and decided the payoff wasn't close enough. Quantum hardware is still genuinely hard, and government money doesn't automatically fix the physics. Here's one that flew under the radar this week. SEALSQ, which makes post-quantum semiconductors — chips designed to resist the kind of code-breaking a future quantum computer could pull off — reported first-half 2026 revenue of eleven point two million dollars, up a hundred and thirty-one percent year over year from four point eight million dollars. That's real, verifiable commercial traction in a week otherwise dominated by government research bets. But here's the other half of the story: net losses widened to twenty-seven point eight million dollars over the same period, even as revenue grew. The company reaffirmed its full-year twenty twenty-six guidance of twenty-seven to thirty-six million dollars in revenue. So what do you do with a number like a hundred and thirty-one percent growth? You put it in context — that's growth off a small base, four point eight million dollars scaling to eleven point two million, not a mature business hitting its stride. And a widening loss alongside strong revenue growth is a pattern that shows up constantly in early-stage hardware and security companies: you spend ahead of the revenue curve, and the bet is that the curve eventually catches up. SEALSQ's pitch is that post-quantum security — protecting today's data against tomorrow's quantum-capable codebreakers — is a real market right now, not a someday market. The revenue growth is the strongest evidence yet that some buyers agree. Whether the losses narrow before the guidance range gets tested is the open question for the back half of the year. Another one that deserves more attention than it got this week: a Sherbrooke, Quebec company called Qubic signed a contract worth up to one point five million Canadian dollars — around one point one million U.S. dollars — with a Canadian federal agency. The job: supply nine kinetic-inductance cryogenic low-noise amplifiers, hardware that sits inside a quantum computer's ultra-cold refrigeration stack and boosts faint qubit signals without drowning them in electronic noise, for testing and evaluation. It's not a glamorous headline next to hundred-million-dollar CHIPS Act stakes, but it's the layer of the industry that rarely gets covered — the supply chain underneath the machines everyone else is racing to build. And it's worth being precise about what this actually is: a testing and evaluation contract, not a production order, and the Canadian government hasn't committed to buying more. Still, it's a real government dollar going toward domestic quantum component manufacturing, and it lands the same week the U.S. government is doing something structurally similar at a much bigger scale — taking equity stakes in hardware companies, funding foundry partnerships, writing checks for optical switches and detectors. Canada's version this week is smaller and quieter: fund the parts suppliers, see what they can build, decide later whether to scale it up. Different size, same underlying instinct — governments deciding the quantum supply chain is worth de-risking with public money. One more that slipped past weekday coverage: the University of Connecticut hired Dmitri Kharzeev, an internationally known quantum physicist who previously held a distinguished professorship at Stony Brook University and a fellowship at Brookhaven National Laboratory, to help lead the school's interdisciplinary quantum research push. It's a straightforward talent story, but talent stories are exactly the kind of thing that gets buried under funding announcements — and a hire like this is how a university signals it wants to be taken seriously in a field where the U.S. government is now literally buying equity stakes in hardware companies. Recruiting a researcher with that kind of pedigree is a bet that the institutional side of quantum — the universities training the next generation of physicists and engineers — matters just as much as who owns a piece of D-Wave or Quantinuum. We don't have specifics yet on which research directions Kharzeev will pursue at UConn, and that's a fair thing to want answered as this develops. And we'll close the week where a lot of it started: PsiQuantum. The company signed definitive documentation with the U.S. Department of Commerce this week for its own hundred-million-dollar CHIPS Act award, funding domestic manufacturing of optical switches, single-photon detectors, and advanced packaging for its photonic quantum computing platform — an approach that uses particles of light instead of the trapped ions or superconducting circuits most of its rivals use. Here's the important caveat: this finalizes a letter of intent PsiQuantum signed back in May, so it's the execution of an already-announced deal, not brand-new money showing up out of nowhere. And it fits a read we've had on this company for a while — PsiQuantum still hasn't shipped a working large-scale machine, and government checks, however large, buy attention and scrutiny in equal measure; the actual proof still has to come from working hardware, not signed paperwork. That's not a knock specific to PsiQuantum — it's the same standard every company in this week's CHIPS Act wave should be held to. D-Wave, Rigetti, Quantinuum, PsiQuantum: four companies, four government checks, and one shared question the money itself can't answer — whether the machines these companies are building actually get there on the timeline everyone's now financially betting on. If this recap saved you from scrolling through a week's worth of quantum headlines, following the show is the easiest way to get the daily version without the homework. We'll be back tomorrow with a deeper look at one of these threads. This has been Quickly Quantum, an AI-voiced podcast, created and built by a real human using today's cutting-edge technology. Nothing you heard on this show is financial advice. I'm Brian Lampert, and I'll catch you all tomorrow — take care! I also host Space Stakes: the business of the new space race, every day. What actually flew, what the contract is really worth, and who has customers. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.