Four of the Nine May Quantum CHIPS Letters of Intent Became Signed $100m Agreements on a Single Morning

by Vikram Desai · September 8, 2026

Funding & Deals Reporter, Frontier Tech Wire

Four quantum computing companies said on Tuesday morning that they have signed agreements with the U.S. Department of Commerce worth $100 million each in CHIPS and Science Act research funding, converting letters of intent that were announced in May but that carried no guarantee of ever closing. Rigetti Computing (Nasdaq: RGTI), D-Wave Quantum (Nasdaq: QBTS), Quantinuum (Nasdaq: QNT) and the privately held PsiQuantum all published announcements on 8 September, each reported by The Quantum Insider the same day.

The language each company used is not identical, and the difference is worth keeping. The Quantum Insider reports that Rigetti "has signed a definitive agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce" and that PsiQuantum "has signed definitive documentation" for its award. Quantinuum's own release says it "finalized an agreement" with the Commerce Department's CHIPS Research and Development Office. The D-Wave account says the company "now has access to up to $100 million of U.S. CHIPS and Science Act funding." Yahoo Finance's write-up describes all of them collectively as having "finalized definitive agreements." Two of the four are explicitly definitive in the companies' own wording; the other two are described as finalised without that word.

The May starting point is worth restating precisely, because the headline number attached to it was never a set of signed contracts. The National Institute of Standards and Technology's release of 21 May 2026 described letters of intent with nine companies, putting the total at "$2.013 billion in federal incentives": $1 billion for IBM, $375 million for GlobalFoundries, $100 million each for Atom Computing, D-Wave, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum and Quantinuum, up to $100 million for Rigetti, and up to $38 million for Diraq. The NIST document uses the terms "letters of intent" and "planned funding" throughout, and does not set out a milestone or tranche structure.

Rigetti's own May press release was explicit that nothing was settled. It conditioned the money on "the Company and the Department's ability to enter into definitive transaction agreements," described the award as "up to $100 million in funding over three years to accelerate superconducting quantum computing R&D," and said "the Department will receive an equity stake in Rigetti consistent with the total amount of the funding." Tuesday's announcements are the step that release contemplated, for four of the nine names.

Rigetti's agreement, signed by subsidiary Rigetti & Co, LLC, is reported as an "award of $100 million in funding" rather than the "up to" figure used in May. It funds three engineering workstreams: "compressing readout electronics into an integrated, miniaturized package"; "expanding cryogenic capacity by orders of magnitude using a new cryostat architecture"; and "developing the fabrication capabilities for high-connectivity chip architectures." Those are scaling problems, not qubit-count promises, and the announcement attaches no dates to any of them.

D-Wave's is for up to $100 million and is scoped to two systems the company does not yet have: "a 100,000-qubit annealing system targeting greater performance across optimization, materials simulation, blockchain and artificial intelligence," and "a 10,000-qubit gate-model system designed to enable 100 logical qubits capable of successfully performing more than one million operations." Read those as the funded objectives of a research programme rather than hardware in a rack. Neither the company's announcement nor the coverage of it sets a delivery date, and no tranche structure is disclosed.

Quantinuum's award is directed at manufacturing rather than at a machine. Its release, issued through PR Newswire on 8 September, names GlobalFoundries as the partner fabricating next-generation ion traps and control electronics on 300mm wafer technology, and Monarch Quantum as the partner developing and manufacturing scalable lasers and optical components, with further work on the supply chain. The Quantum Insider notes Quantinuum "was the only company with a trapped-ion based architecture to be awarded CHIPS R&D funding."

PsiQuantum, which remains private, said its $100 million supports work on optical switches, high-temperature single-photon detectors and advanced packaging, again with GlobalFoundries, a manufacturing partner it has worked with since 2019. The Quantum Insider's account adds that in 2025 the company "invested approximately $200 million with hundreds of American suppliers and vendors across 38 states," and that in July 2026 it announced "a new $125 million expanded agreement" with DARPA — a reminder that the CHIPS money is one line in a larger public funding stack, not the whole of it.

The equity condition is where the four announcements diverge in what they disclose, and the divergence is worth flagging rather than smoothing over. The Rigetti announcement states that "the Department will receive a minority, non-controlling equity stake in Rigetti as a condition for receiving the funds," and the D-Wave announcement carries the same sentence with D-Wave's name in it. Quantinuum's own press release, read in full, makes no mention of an equity stake, a minority or non-controlling interest, government ownership or warrants; the published PsiQuantum coverage likewise does not describe an equity condition. The May NIST release had said 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" — the phrase "in each company" is verbatim from that release — and Yahoo Finance on Tuesday described the programme as involving the U.S. taking equity stakes in each recipient. On the evidence available, this is a difference in what Tuesday's documents disclose, not established evidence that the terms differ. Nothing published on Tuesday says the equity condition has been waived for anyone, and nothing published on Tuesday confirms it applies to Quantinuum or PsiQuantum.

Nor is the size of the stake disclosed anywhere. No percentage, no valuation basis, no vesting or repurchase mechanics, no payment schedule, no clawback language and no milestone gates appear in any of the four announcements or in the wire coverage of them. Rigetti's May release remains the only public indication of duration — up to $100 million over three years — and that language was written for the letter of intent, not for the agreement signed this week.

The executives said what executives say on days like this. Rigetti chief executive Subodh Kulkarni, per The Quantum Insider: "We are proud to be selected by the U.S. government to accelerate R&D and progress against our roadmap to deliver commercially viable quantum computing capabilities." D-Wave chief executive Alan Baratz: "We're grateful to the U.S. government for this award to D-Wave and for the leadership it is demonstrating in advancing quantum innovation." Quantinuum president and chief executive Rajeeb Hazra: "This award is a validation of Quantinuum's leadership in trapped-ion quantum computing." PsiQuantum chief executive Victor Peng: "America's national security and economic prosperity depend on secure supply chains for cutting-edge technologies."

The through-line across all four is manufacturing, not qubits. GlobalFoundries chief executive Tim Breen, quoted in the PsiQuantum announcement, put it as plainly as anyone: "Useful quantum systems will be built on manufacturing that already works at scale." Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's framing in May was political rather than technical — "With today's CHIPS Research and Development investments in quantum computing, the Trump administration is leading the world into a new era of American innovation."

On the tape, the reaction ran ahead of the opening bell. Yahoo Finance had the three listed names higher in Tuesday premarket trade, quoting Rigetti up 7.4% at $16.33, D-Wave up 5.4% at $17.48 and Quantinuum up 3.9% at $51.56; that page carries no timestamp for the quotes. A 24/7 Wall St. piece published at 9:20 a.m. ET, before the 9:30 open, had Rigetti "up 6% to $16.13 in early trading" and D-Wave "climbing 5% to $17.46," with the Defiance Quantum ETF up 1% and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF down 0.12%. Those are pre-open figures. As of roughly 11:20 a.m. ET the session is still open, and none of them is a closing price for 8 September.

A plain risk note is in order. Rigetti and D-Wave are small-capitalisation companies whose revenues are a small fraction of the sums under discussion; PsiQuantum is private and discloses no financials; a research award is not revenue, and a signed agreement to fund engineering work is not evidence that the engineering will succeed. Where the government takes equity, that means dilution for existing holders, on terms that have not been published. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything.

The open question is the other five. Atom Computing, Infleqtion, Diraq, IBM and GlobalFoundries were all named in the May letters of intent, and none of them featured in Tuesday's round of announcements. Whether their terms match the four signed this week — particularly on the equity condition and on how much of each award is milestone-gated — is the detail worth waiting for.