IBM shares surged more than 6 percent in Thursday trading after the United States Department of Commerce announced a $2 billion federal investment in nine quantum computing companies, with IBM receiving the largest single award of $1 billion and committing to match it with another $1 billion of its own money to build what it is calling the nation’s first purpose-built quantum chip manufacturing facility.
The announcement, first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday morning and quickly confirmed by IBM and other recipient companies, represents the most significant federal investment in quantum computing in American history.
It sent the entire sector surging before the opening bell. IBM was up more than 7 percent.
D-Wave Quantum was up more than 16 percent. Infleqtion was up more than 26 percent.
Rigetti Computing was up approximately 14 percent. GlobalFoundries, which is receiving $375 million from the same package, gained approximately 7 percent.
The money comes from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act and comes with a condition that previous government grant programs have not typically included, the US government is taking equity stakes in each of the nine recipient companies.
What IBM Is Getting And What It Is Building
IBM is the largest single beneficiary of the $2 billion package, receiving $1 billion from the Commerce Department, which equals half the total federal allocation.
The company said it will match that government funding with $1 billion of its own, creating a $2 billion combined investment directed at a specific and previously nonexistent piece of American quantum infrastructure.
IBM confirmed Thursday that the initiative will be directed toward developing what it described as “America’s first purpose-built quantum chip manufacturing facility,” a quantum foundry dedicated specifically to producing the specialized chips that quantum computers require rather than the classical silicon chips that existing semiconductor fabs produce.
The company’s statement framed the facility in terms of national strategic importance rather than simply commercial development.
The quantum foundry will, IBM said, “accelerate American quantum innovation and enable advanced quantum wafer production for a broad range of companies,” meaning it is intended to serve the entire quantum computing ecosystem, not just IBM’s own hardware programs.
The specific significance of dedicated quantum chip manufacturing infrastructure is worth understanding.
Quantum computers are not simply faster classical computers, they operate on fundamentally different physical principles, using quantum bits that exploit quantum mechanical properties including superposition and entanglement rather than the binary 0s and 1s of classical computing.
The chips that enable quantum computation require manufacturing processes that are entirely different from those used to make classical semiconductors, and currently no American facility is specifically designed and equipped to produce them at scale.
IBM’s planned quantum foundry is intended to fill that gap.
The Equity Stakes
The most unusual structural feature of Thursday’s announcement is the US government’s decision to take equity stakes in the companies receiving grants, not just provide funds but accept partial ownership of the recipients in exchange for the investment.
This approach mirrors what the Trump administration has already done in other strategic technology sectors.
The government has previously taken significant equity stakes in Intel and in MP Materials, the California-based rare earth mining company whose materials are essential to semiconductor and defense manufacturing.
The pattern reflects a deliberate policy choice to treat strategic technology investment not as pure subsidy but as equity participation, the government not simply funding companies but becoming an ownership stakeholder in the enterprises it considers nationally important.
D-Wave Quantum confirmed Thursday that its entire $100 million award will come in the form of an equity investment, meaning the government is not giving D-Wave $100 million in grant funding but is instead purchasing $100 million in D-Wave ownership.
CEO Alan Baratz described the implications for the company positively:
“The award would accelerate D-Wave’s ability to scale quantum innovation domestically, expedite key fabrication processes, and deliver real-world quantum applications to our global customers today.”
The equity stake model creates a different alignment of interests than a pure grant structure.
A company that receives a grant has an obligation to use the funds as specified but no ongoing relationship with the government as an ownership partner.
A company in which the government holds equity has the government as a permanent stakeholder, potentially with representation, information rights and influence over strategic decisions.
The long-term implications of government equity stakes in nine quantum computing companies are not fully understood yet, but the immediate market reaction on Thursday treated it as an unambiguously positive signal for the sector.
The Nine Companies And The Full Distribution
The $2 billion federal commitment is distributed across nine companies at significantly different scales.
IBM’s $1 billion represents exactly half the total package and reflects the company’s position as the most established and technically advanced quantum computing organization among the recipients.
GlobalFoundries’ $375 million reflects its role as a semiconductor manufacturer rather than a quantum computing company per se, GlobalFoundries will presumably use the funding to develop quantum chip manufacturing capability that serves the broader ecosystem.
D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing and Infleqtion are each receiving approximately $100 million.
All three are publicly traded, all three had significant premarket gains Thursday, and all three are meaningfully smaller companies than IBM for whom $100 million in government investment represents a substantially larger share of their operational resources.
Startup Diraq is in line for approximately $38 million. Three additional recipients, Atom Computing, PsiQuantum and Quantinuum, were identified as part of the nine but with funding amounts not yet fully specified in the initial reporting.
The deals are still being formally completed as of Thursday’s announcement.
The CHIPS and Science Act funding that provides the capital has been deployed in tranches since the law’s passage in 2022, and these quantum computing awards represent one of the later rounds of that deployment as the program has expanded from its initial semiconductor manufacturing focus toward the broader advanced computing ecosystem.
Why The US Is Doing This Now
The stated rationale for the quantum computing investment package is explicitly competitive, the Trump administration has framed it as part of its broader strategy to counter China’s growing capabilities in advanced technology sectors and to ensure that the United States maintains technological leadership in computing infrastructure.
China has been investing heavily in quantum computing research and development through state-directed programs that provide both funding and institutional focus to Chinese quantum computing organizations.
The US government’s concern is that without comparable structured investment, Chinese programs could achieve practical quantum advantage, the point at which a quantum computer can solve real-world problems better than any classical computer, before American efforts do, with significant implications for cryptography, scientific research, drug discovery, materials science, logistics optimization and a range of other domains where quantum computing is expected to eventually provide transformative capability.
The quantum computing sector has attracted intense investor interest over the past year as the technology has advanced from theoretical demonstration toward early practical applications.
Quantum computing stocks broadly gained enormous ground in 2025, with companies like Rigetti and D-Wave seeing gains of 600 percent or more over the prior year.
The Thursday announcement adds government institutional backing to the investor enthusiasm that has already been reshaping valuations across the sector.
IBM’s Quantum Position
IBM has been one of the most consistent and technically ambitious participants in the quantum computing race since it launched its first publicly available quantum computer through the IBM Quantum Experience in 2016.
The company has invested billions of dollars in quantum hardware, software and research over the past decade and has built one of the most advanced fleets of quantum systems in existence, made accessible to researchers and developers through its cloud platform.
The company’s Quantum Nighthawk processor, unveiled at its annual Quantum Developer Conference in November 2025, was the most advanced processor in its development roadmap and kept IBM on its stated trajectory toward quantum advantage.
The Thursday funding announcement accelerates the manufacturing dimension of that roadmap, moving from research and hardware development toward the industrial-scale production of quantum chips that a mature quantum computing industry will require.
For IBM shareholders, the $1 billion government award combined with IBM’s own matching commitment creates a $2 billion accelerant for a business line that was already IBM’s most forward-looking growth story.
The stock’s 7 percent gain on Thursday reflects the market’s assessment that $2 billion in combined investment directed at building the quantum foundry that the entire industry has been lacking is genuinely transformative for IBM’s quantum competitive position.
