Key points
- Up to $375 million over five years, tied to milestones
- Letter of intent from May is now a signed agreement
- $300 million photonics award is still a letter of intent
- Commerce Department takes a stake of about 1%
GlobalFoundries (GFS) has signed a final agreement with the US Commerce Department for up to $375 million to develop and build quantum chips in the United States. The money comes over five years and depends on the company hitting milestones. Its shares were up 1.6% at $45.93 in morning trading on Tuesday.
The company announced the agreement in a September 8 release from Malta, New York. The award comes from the Commerce Department's CHIPS Research and Development Office and funds the company's Quantum Technology Solutions business, a unit it set up in May. The release says the money supports research in cryogenic CMOS, advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration. Cryogenic CMOS means ordinary silicon chips designed to work at the very low temperatures quantum computers run at. Heterogeneous integration means combining different kinds of chips in one package. The stated goal is to help quantum computing companies move from research and prototypes to production at commercial scale.
The release doesn't name a customer and gives no date for when the funding starts or what the milestones are. Nicholas Sergeant, vice president and general manager of Quantum Technology Solutions, said in the release, "This is another important milestone for Quantum Technology Solutions and our efforts to build a scalable domestic quantum manufacturing ecosystem."
The $375 million was first announced on May 21, when the Commerce Department signed letters of intent with nine quantum companies for $2.013 billion in total, according to the department's announcement. The department said GlobalFoundries' job is to build a secure US foundry that can make chips for the main types of quantum computer, listing superconducting, trapped ion, photonic, topological and silicon spin designs. IBM's (IBM) proposed award was the largest at $1 billion. D-Wave (QBTS), Rigetti (RGTI), PsiQuantum, Quantinuum, Infleqtion and Atom Computing were each in line for about $100 million, and Diraq for up to $38 million. We looked at that program in June.
GlobalFoundries isn't the only one signing this week. D-Wave, Rigetti and Quantinuum each said Tuesday that they had finalized their $100 million agreements, Quartz reported, and PsiQuantum said the same, according to The Quantum Insider. D-Wave's 8-K filing shows its agreement was signed September 4 and gives the government 7,095,721 shares at $14.093 each.
Quantinuum's own release says GlobalFoundries "will be one of several of Quantinuum's foundries enlisted to fabricate its next-generation ion traps and other electronics, specifically focused on using 300mm wafer technology." An ion trap is the chip that holds the charged atoms a trapped-ion quantum computer runs on.
The government gets something in return. When GlobalFoundries set up the quantum unit on May 21, it said the Commerce Department would make "a strategic equity investment in GF, representing approximately one percent ownership as of today's date." The stake is in GlobalFoundries itself, not just the quantum unit.
