D-Wave Quantum receives a $100M grant

The money is access to "up to" $100M under the CHIPS and Science Act, not a guaranteed full payout. Commerce says it will fund semiconductor process R&D for superconducting annealing and gate-model systems, covering qubit counts, error rates and coherence. D-Wave plans a 100,000-qubit annealing system and a 10,000-qubit gate-model system designed to enable 100 logical qubits. D-Wave was one of nine quantum companies to get Commerce letters of intent in May 2026, with total government funding at $2.013 billion. Rigetti signed a matching $100M agreement the same day. The award arrives while the stock is weak. Shares were down about 40% year to date in mid-September, and second-quarter revenue of $3.1M missed the $4M analyst estimate. For AI founders, the award is a signal about policy more than a product. The federal government is taking equity in quantum hardware, and the 100,000-qubit system is aimed at optimization and AI workloads, but those systems are still development targets. Near-term quantum exposure for an AI company means renting existing machines through D-Wave's Leap cloud, not planning around the new hardware.