The U.S. government announced a $2 billion investment across nine quantum computing companies last week, considered as part of efforts to shore up the domestic supply chain and counter China in crucial sectors. This included a new IBM venture.
However, a member of the Congress is now arguing that these deals are illegal, since Congress did not allocate the money for this purpose. Rather, it was meant to support public research in semiconductors.
Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.), the ranking member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee said: “This announcement is illegal and troubling on so many levels,” one day after the announcement, pointing out that the money being used for the deal comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, which was passed during the Biden administration and was allocated “specifically for microelectronics R&D, with a focus on semiconductor technology.”
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Lofgren said that this technology only overlaps partially with what’s used in quantum processors. She also mentioned that in addition, the money was allocated to foster public/private research partnerships, which these deals most decidedly are not. Finally, she noted that the largest sum of money will go to IBM, and she suggested that a former IBM executive (Dario Gil, current Under Secretary for Science at the Department of Energy) was involved in the negotiations that led to this deal.
Lofgren added that none of this meant that quantum processing technology is a bad investment or that any of these companies are unworthy of support. She just argued that doing so would require Congress to allocate the money to do so.
However, at this point it’s not clear how the deal can be stopped. While a lawsuit has been cited as the obvious answer, that would require a party ready to sue. It’s possible that a company that might otherwise have used the money for the intended research (a public-private partnership focused on electronics) could argue that it has been harmed by the diversion of the funds to a different field. However, that argument would likely take so long to sort out in court that all the money would have been spent by then.
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The U.S. Department of Commerce had announced the investment on Thursday. It said that IBM would receive $1 billion to set up a new company dedicated to manufacturing chips for quantum computers. Contract chipmaker GlobalFoundries would get $375 million to build a domestic factory capable of producing components for several different types of quantum machines.
D-Wave, Rigetti Computing, and Infleqtion are to get $100 million, while Diraq will receive up to $38 million to solve key technical hurdles that have held back the development of more powerful quantum computers, according to the Commerce Department.