$2B quantum investment draws ethics scrutiny

The U.S. government is awarding $2 billion in equity stakes to nine quantum computing companies as part of its CHIPS Research and Development program, with IBM as the biggest beneficiary among firms including D-Wave Quantum, Atom Computing, and PsiQuantum, according to multiple reports. The deals reportedly are not yet final and the White House is still soliciting proposals from other tech firms. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stated that the investment would "build on our domestic industry, creating thousands of high-paying American jobs while advancing American quantum capabilities." Two of the companies have raised ethical concerns due to their political connections. PsiQuantum, which received $100 million, is connected to Donald Trump Jr.'s firm 1789 Capital, while D-Wave Quantum was taken public in 2022 by Michael Emil, a current top Pentagon official whose company's stock surged following the announcement. Senator Elizabeth Warren and other U.S. representatives have previously pressed the Department of Defense about contracts awarded to companies associated with Donald Trump Jr., including Cerebras Systems, PsiQuantum, and Firehawk Aerospace. The quantum computing sector remains largely theoretical with few concrete achievements, though the technology theoretically uses qubits that can represent multiple states simultaneously instead of binary ones and zeros, potentially enabling faster calculations for breaking encryption and physics simulations. The announcement follows the Trump administration's broader strategy of investing in key market areas like chips and critical minerals, including a $10 billion investment in Intel last year, which is now facing a shareholder lawsuit over that government deal. Last October, IBM demonstrated its quantum capabilities by running an out-of-time-ordered correlator algorithm faster than a regular computer.