GoKawiilIBM has announced that it will create Anderon, a standalone company and America's first pure-play quantum chip foundry, backed by a proposed $1 billion CHIPS Act R&D award from the U.S. Department of Commerce and a matching $1 billion cash investment from IBM itself.
Headquartered in Albany, New York, Anderon will operate a 300mm quantum wafer fab and offer its manufacturing services to competing quantum hardware vendors. The deal was the centerpiece of a broader $2.013 billion federal quantum portfolio split across nine companies, the largest single quantum R&D commitment in U.S. history.
In launching Anderon, IBM is attempting to build the quantum computing industry's equivalent of TSMC, a neutral third-party manufacturer that’ll fabricate superconducting qubit wafers for other companies as well as IBM's own processors. No such foundry exists anywhere in the world today, with every operational quantum computer having been built by a vertically integrated company that designs, fabricates, and operates its own hardware.
Latest Videos From
A nine-company package
IBM's $1 billion award accounts for roughly half of the entire DoC quantum package. GlobalFoundries received a separate $375 million allocation to launch a "Quantum Technology Solutions" foundry covering multiple qubit architectures, including superconducting, trapped-ion, photonic, and silicon-spin designs. The remaining seven recipients each received smaller awards: D-Wave, Rigetti, Atom Computing, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum, and Quantinuum were each awarded $100 million, while Australian silicon-spin startup Diraq will receive up to $38 million.
Those seven non-foundry companies are required to give the federal government a minority, non-controlling equity stake in exchange for funding. Rigetti has also disclosed in a memorandum of understanding that the government will receive common stock at a 15% discount, while GlobalFoundries separately disclosed a 1% federal equity stake.
IBM's announcement contains no equivalent equity-stake disclosure for Anderon, a somewhat conspicuous omission given that the Trump administration converted part of Intel’s CHIPS Act manufacturing award into a roughly 10% government equity stake last year.
300mm wafer fabrication
IBM said back in November that all of its current and upcoming quantum processors are built on 300mm silicon wafers at the Albany NanoTech Complex, the largest public-private semiconductor R&D facility operated by the nonprofit NY CREATES. Jay Gambetta, IBM's Director of Research, wrote that the shift from 200mm to 300mm produces device output roughly 30 times faster by multiplying device complexity tenfold and tripling devices per line.
... continue reading