Same Program, Four Levels of Disclosure: What CHIPS Recipients Have Told Investors About the Government's Equity
The U.S. government has spent this spring and summer attaching an unusual string to CHIPS research and development money: it wants stock. Across two announcements, the Department of Commerce said it would take a minority equity position in every company receiving an award. What it has not done is standardize how those companies explain to their own shareholders what that equity will cost them. The result is a disclosure gap that runs right through a group of publicly traded frontier-tech names, and it is wide enough that a shareholder in one company can sketch out the dilution on the back of an envelope while a shareholder in another has nothing to work with at all.
The program itself is well documented. In a release dated Thursday, May 21, 2026, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced letters of intent with nine companies covering roughly $2 billion in proposed quantum computing awards: IBM at $1 billion, GlobalFoundries at $375 million, and Atom Computing, D-Wave, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum and Quantinuum at $100 million apiece, with Rigetti at up to $100 million and Diraq at up to $38 million. On Wednesday, July 29, 2026, NIST announced a second tranche, seven letters of intent totalling $874 million aimed at the compute supply chain: GlobalFoundries at up to $300 million for co-packaged optics, Kepler at up to $245 million, Multibeam at up to $140 million, Extropic at up to $75 million, Thintronics at up to $50 million, OBSIDIA Semiconductors at up to $34 million and Aeluma at up to $30 million.
That is sixteen letters of intent, but not sixteen companies. GlobalFoundries appears in both tranches, once for quantum work and once for co-packaged optics, which makes the count fifteen distinct recipients across the two announcements and roughly $2.89 billion in proposed awards, NIST's own $2.013 billion and $874 million totals added together. It is a small correction, and it matters mainly because the equity condition attaches per award rather than per company, so GlobalFoundries is the one name in the group facing the condition twice.
The equity condition is stated identically in both NIST releases. "The Department will receive a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each company as a condition for receiving the funds to enhance the return for the U.S. taxpayer." That single sentence is the entire public specification. It does not say how the stake is priced, when it is valued, whether it carries a discount, or what rights attach to it. Everything an investor might want to know about the arithmetic has been left to the individual companies to disclose, or not.
Commerce has framed the program as deliberately diversified. "The CHIPS R&D Office is taking a portfolio approach to strengthen and accelerate U.S. leadership across multiple quantum modalities at once, while focusing each award on discrete technological problems of genuine consequence," said Bill Frauenhofer, whom the May 21 release identifies as Executive Director of Semiconductor Investment and Innovation. "We will be providing incentives to build domestic quantum capacity, solve the hardest engineering challenges, enable multi-year acceleration of technology roadmaps, and drive continued U.S. quantum leadership." A small note for anyone cross-checking: the July 29 release gives the same official a differently ordered title, Executive Director for Semiconductor Innovation and Investment. The version used above is the one the May release printed alongside the words quoted.
Rigetti Computing, which trades on Nasdaq under RGTI, gave shareholders the most complete picture. In an 8-K filed May 21, 2026, the company disclosed under Item 8.01 that its subsidiary Rigetti & Co, LLC had entered a letter of intent with Commerce on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, covering a proposed $100 million award over three years. The filing states: "The Letter of Intent contemplates that the Department will be issued shares of the Company's common stock in an amount consistent with the total amount of the Award."
Then it does something none of the others do. It publishes the formula. "The implied issuance price for the shares will be the lowest reported closing price per share on: (i) the date that the first draft of the letter of intent was transmitted from the Department to Rigetti Sub (May 5, 2026), (ii) the date that the LOI is executed by Rigetti LLC and the Department (May 20, 2026), and (iii) the date the award is issued, in each case, discounted by fifteen percent (15%)." May 5, 2026 was a Tuesday; May 20 was a Wednesday.
That is a genuinely computable mechanism, with one catch: two of its three inputs are historical closing prices this desk was unable to source, and the third has not happened yet. The free historical price tables this desk could reach begin in June 2026 or carry only monthly aggregates for May: stockanalysis.com's daily history for RGTI starts at June 4, 2026, and StockScan's price-history page gives May only as a monthly summary. Neither surfaced a May 5 or May 20 close. Without those two numbers, the exact implied issuance price cannot be stated, and neither can the exact share count. That is a real hole and it is worth naming rather than papering over.
What can be sourced is the boundary. StockScan's monthly summary for Rigetti shows a May 2026 trading range with a high of $27.79 and a low of $15.46, and a monthly gain of 46.36%. Because both relevant dates fall inside that month, both closes must sit somewhere inside that band. Applying the filing's 15% discount to each end of the sourced range gives an implied issuance price somewhere between roughly $13.14 and roughly $23.62. At the full $100 million, that is somewhere between about 4.2 million and about 7.6 million new shares. Those are ceilings rather than point estimates: NIST's May release lists Rigetti at up to $100 million and the company's own August 6 results release describes an award of up to $100 million over three years, even though the 8-K's operative sentence says "a proposed $100 million award." Against the 333,676,881 shares Rigetti reported outstanding as of June 30, 2026 in that same release, the range works out to between roughly 1.3% and roughly 2.3% of the share count. That arithmetic is this publication's own, derived from the sourced range and the filed formula.
The band is wide, and the third term makes it wider in one direction only. The formula takes the lowest of three closes, and the third is the date the award is issued, which has not occurred. Rigetti's 52-week range runs from $12.53 to $58.15, and because the formula keys off closing prices rather than intraday extremes, the relevant marker is that the lowest daily close between June 4, 2026 and Friday's session was $13.22, on Wednesday, July 29, 2026, per stockanalysis.com's daily history. If the award were issued on a day that closed below both May dates, the discounted price falls further and the share count rises further. The floor of the dilution is bounded; the ceiling is not, and it will not be until Commerce issues the award.
Infleqtion, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under INFQ, published a formula too, but not the same one. Its May 21, 2026 announcement states: "The LOI also contemplates taxpayer upside through the issuance of Infleqtion common stock to the Department on the award date with a value of $100 million at a 15% discount to market based on the closing price on the execution date of the LOI or the definitive agreement, whichever is lower." The release adds that "The securities are expected to be held on a passive basis" and that "Final terms remain subject to definitive award documents and required approvals of the U.S. Government."
The two formulas share a 15% discount and diverge everywhere else. Rigetti's looks back to the date the first draft of the letter was transmitted and forward to the award issuance date, three observation points in all. Infleqtion's uses two: the LOI execution date and the definitive agreement date, whichever produces the lower close. Neither is obviously more or less favourable in the abstract; they simply sample different days, and which one produces more dilution depends entirely on where the stock happens to trade on the dates each formula names. Infleqtion is also the only one of the four to have said anything in public about how the stake will be held, with that reference to a passive basis. Worth noting for anyone reading the coverage rather than the source: at least one outlet has described Infleqtion as a Nasdaq listing. The company's own investor relations release carries NYSE: INFQ, and stockanalysis.com lists it on the NYSE.
D-Wave Quantum disclosed neither a formula nor a discount. Its 8-K, dated May 21, 2026 and filed with a cover page listing the New York Stock Exchange and the ticker QBTS, says under Item 8.01 that "In connection with executing final award documents, D-Wave would issue $100 million in shares of its common stock (the 'Shares') to the Department" and that "The funding and the issuance of the Shares are subject to the execution of definitive award documents by the parties." That is the whole of it. This desk read the filing rather than a summary of it, and the absence is real: there is no per-share price, no discount percentage, no valuation date, and no observation window anywhere in the document. A shareholder knows the dollar value going in and nothing about the price at which it converts to stock.
D-Wave has since changed exchanges, which matters for anyone pulling the filing today and finding a cover page that no longer matches the tape. The company announced on Tuesday, July 14, 2026 that it would move its listing, saying it expected its common stock to begin trading on Nasdaq on July 27, 2026, with the NYSE listing effective after the market close on July 24, 2026. July 24 was a Friday and July 27 a Monday. The May 8-K is therefore correctly read as an NYSE-period filing; stockanalysis.com lists QBTS on Nasdaq as of Friday, August 14, 2026.
Aeluma, on Nasdaq as ALMU, is in the same position as D-Wave. Its July 29, 2026 release says: "In connection with executing final award documents, Aeluma would issue equity securities to the U.S. Department of Commerce with an aggregate value equal to the award amount." On structure, the release says "The LOI contemplates a portion of the award being funded up front and the remainder funded on a milestone-based award structure tied to eligible project costs and technical progress," and on conditionality, "The award is subject to the completion of further due diligence, required approvals, including internal approvals of the U.S. Government, and the parties' execution of definitive award documents." No pricing date, no discount, no formula. Nor is there one anywhere else in the filed record: Aeluma furnished that release as Exhibit 99.1 to a Form 8-K filed Thursday, July 30, 2026 under Items 7.01 and 9.01, and the body of the 8-K itself does no more than report that the company "issued a press release announcing its entry into a CHIPS and Science Act Letter of Intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce." This desk read that filing on EDGAR rather than a summary of it.
The scale differences make the gap consequential rather than merely procedural. Using Friday, August 14, 2026 closing data from stockanalysis.com, Rigetti closed at $18.82 with a market capitalization of $6.28 billion, so a $100 million issuance is on the order of 1.6% of the company by value. D-Wave closed at $21.17 with a $7.88 billion capitalization, putting $100 million near 1.3%. Infleqtion closed at $12.86 with 224.68 million shares outstanding and a $2.89 billion capitalization, putting $100 million near 3.5%. All three percentages are this publication's own arithmetic against those closing figures.
Aeluma is the outlier by an order of magnitude. It closed at $18.42 on Friday, August 14, 2026, with a market capitalization of $337.18 million on 18.31 million shares outstanding and trailing twelve-month revenue of $5.20 million, per stockanalysis.com. A $30 million issuance is roughly 8.9% of that capitalization, and at Friday's close it would be roughly 1.6 million shares, or about 8.9% of the existing share count. That is this publication's arithmetic. The company with the least disclosed about pricing is the company where pricing moves the needle most.
Which brings up the question sitting underneath all of it: has any of these definitive award agreements actually been signed? On the public record as of Saturday, August 15, 2026, the answer appears to be no, and the most recent evidence is only days old. Infleqtion's second-quarter results release of August 12, 2026 states that "The U.S. Department of Commerce selected Infleqtion for a Letter of Intent providing for up to $100 million in proposed funding to advance commercialization following a technical review of the Company's technology and roadmap," and adds flatly that "The proposed funding remains subject to definitive agreements and government approvals."
Rigetti's August 6, 2026 second-quarter release is consistent with that. It describes the May announcement as a letter of intent and lists among its forward-looking items the "Company and the U.S. Department of Commerce's ability to enter into definitive transaction agreements" and "the timing of entry into any such definitive transaction agreements." The original 8-K had already framed the next step in conditional terms: "Pursuant to the LOI, the Company and the Department have agreed to negotiate in good faith to enter into definitive transaction agreements with respect to the Award." Good-faith negotiation is not a signature. For D-Wave and Aeluma, both filings remain expressly conditioned on execution of definitive award documents, and neither company has announced that execution. A search of EDGAR's full-text index for current reports referring to the Department of Commerce filed by Rigetti, D-Wave or Aeluma since the announcements turns up nothing beyond what is already described here: Rigetti's August 6 earnings 8-K, a D-Wave Regulation FD filing dated June 1, 2026, and Aeluma's July 30 furnishing of its own release. None of them reports an executed award agreement.
There is also a category of information that none of the four has disclosed. Nothing in the public documents addresses whether the government's shares will carry registration rights, whether they will be subject to transfer restrictions or a lockup, whether there is any anti-dilution protection, whether the stake carries information or governance rights beyond the passive-basis language Infleqtion used, or what happens to the equity if a milestone-based award like Aeluma's is only partly funded. Those are ordinary terms in any private placement of this size, and on the current record they are simply unknown.
The wider market gave the story no help either way on Friday, August 14, 2026, when the S&P 500 closed at 7,785.76, down 0.17%, the Nasdaq Composite at 26,729.16, down 0.28%, the Dow at 53,732.41, down 0.20%, and the Russell 2000 at 3,068.42, up 0.51%. This was never going to be a price story. It is a filings story, and the filings are what will resolve it.
The practical takeaway is about where to look rather than what to conclude. The definitive award documents, when and if they are executed, will be the first place any of this becomes precise, and each of these companies would be expected to file an 8-K on execution. Until then, Rigetti and Infleqtion shareholders have a formula they can apply once the missing closing prices and the award date are known, and D-Wave and Aeluma shareholders have a dollar amount and an unanswered question. Same program, same equity condition, four different levels of visibility into the same arithmetic. Nothing here is a view on any of these securities; it is a description of what has been disclosed and what has not.
