Anderon, an IBM company, has finalized a $1 billion award under the CHIPS and Science Act with the U.S. Department of Commerce, the company said today. The money is meant to speed up the venture's research and development work on quantum wafer manufacturing in the United States. The agreement follows a letter of intent between the department and IBM announced in May.
The Albany, New York-based business runs a 300-millimeter pure-play quantum wafer foundry, a facility dedicated to making quantum wafers for customers rather than chips of its own design. IBM has put an additional $1 billion behind the venture. Anderon says the first quantum wafers are already moving through the fab, an early production step it presents as proof that pre-production research can be turned into commercial-grade wafer technology.
The wafers Anderon makes are built for high-performance superconducting qubit arrays, quantum input and output signaling, and readout signal chain components, capabilities that the company says apply across a range of quantum architectures. It plans to add other quantum modalities later, without saying which ones or when.
The award is the second stage of a process that began with the May letter of intent, and it converts that preliminary step into a signed agreement. Anderon's pitch to the market is scale: the company describes itself as a pure-play foundry serving customers across the quantum ecosystem, with a fab purpose-built for quantum processors.
Mukesh Khare, CEO of Anderon, framed the deal as a manufacturing question. "This agreement with the Department of Commerce strengthens our ability to deliver the manufacturing scale the quantum industry needs," he said. Jay Gambetta, Director, IBM Research and an IBM Fellow, said IBM's quantum roadmap needs a manufacturing base that can keep pace with its research, and that Anderon's wafer fabrication focus supplies it.
The announcement leans on a familiar argument for government support of quantum work: that scalable manufacturing will decide how quickly the technology reaches large-scale commercial use, with effects that could show up in materials, chemistry, optimization, and cybersecurity. Anderon says its role is to provide that production-scale foundation, support domestic supply chains, and help the wider quantum ecosystem grow.
What the announcement does not include is a schedule. No timeline is given for expanding beyond superconducting qubits, no customer names are disclosed, and no date is attached to when the $1 billion will be spent or what production volumes the Albany fab is expected to reach.
