NSF Announces More Than $290m for Eight Quantum Institutes, With a New Princeton-Led Award Aimed at Fabrication

by Vikram Desai · August 31, 2026

Funding & Deals Reporter, Frontier Tech Wire

The US National Science Foundation announced on August 25, 2026 that eight Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes "will collectively receive" more than $290m, according to the agency's own announcement. The verb matters: this is an announcement of awards, not a disclosure of money already obligated or disbursed, and the agency page gives no drawdown schedule. Three of the eight are newly formed and five are receiving renewed funding, and the NSF page puts individual awards in a band of approximately $28m to $37m over five years. The Quantum Insider, reporting the same announcement, described the NSF as "providing" the $290m and noted the funding reaches researchers across 36 higher-education institutions in 19 states.

That is a meaningful sum for university-scale quantum research, though it is worth keeping the scale honest: $290m spread across eight institutes and five years works out to under $8m a year each. This is the pre-competitive layer of the stack - materials science, fabrication technique, error-correction theory, sensor physics and workforce training - not a procurement of machines.

Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director, framed the awards in terms of the agency's long horizon in the field. "For more than four decades, NSF has been laying the foundational groundwork of research and discovery that is powering today's modern quantum computing, sensing and communication," he said in the NSF announcement, which The Quantum Insider also carried.

MARQUIS and the Josephson junction problem

The award that most directly touches the hardware industry is NSF MARQUIS - Manufacturable and Resilient superconducting Quantum Information Systems - led by Princeton, which says the new institute will receive $27.9m over five years. Princeton's announcement, also dated August 25, names Nathalie de Leon, professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-director of the Princeton Quantum Initiative, as director. Valla Fatemi is deputy director; Princeton describes him as a physicist at Cornell, and Cornell's own account gives his title as assistant professor in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics.

The premise is that superconducting quantum processors have hit a materials wall rather than a design wall. "The whole community has been using essentially the same materials technology for about a quarter century," de Leon told Princeton's news office, adding that in the semiconductor industry in particular "a lot of the best knowledge is behind a curtain" and that the answer was to "make a dream team to try to unblock this." Fatemi put the difficulty in blunter terms in Cornell's account of the award: "There's a huge barrier to solving the problem. That's why we need an institute like this, with all this multi-interdisciplinary expertise to solve it."

The concrete target is the Josephson junction, the nonlinear element at the heart of every superconducting qubit. Cornell's write-up says Fatemi's group will develop and characterise new types of junction, and describes two specific recent results with their conditions: depositing tantalum on silicon using krypton gas at 200 degrees Celsius, a temperature compatible with semiconductor manufacturing, and a resist-free fabrication method using etched silicon trenches to reduce contamination. Those are process-development directions reported by the university, not demonstrated device-performance improvements - Cornell reports no qubit coherence or error-rate figure attached to either - and the institute has five years to turn them into something a fab can repeat.

The partner list is unusually industrial for an NSF institute. Princeton lists Cornell, MIT, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford, Dartmouth College, NY Creates, Michigan State University and the University of Iowa as institutional partners, with an advisory board drawing on Google Quantum AI, Nvidia, Applied Materials, Oxford Instruments, Bluefors, KU Leuven/Imec and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. NY Creates operates the Albany NanoTech complex; Applied Materials, Oxford Instruments and Bluefors sell the deposition, etch and cryogenic equipment the field runs on.

Error correction gets $37.5m at Yale

The NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Physics and Engineering of Practical Quantum Error Correction, or PRACTIQAL, is led by Yale and was awarded $37.5m over five years, according to The Quantum Insider's August 26 report on the award. Robert Schoelkopf, Sterling Professor of Applied Physics at Yale, is director; Michael Hatridge, an associate professor of applied physics, is co-director.

Schoelkopf's framing is worth quoting because it is the plainest statement of the field's central problem from someone who has spent decades on it. "Today, error correction is the main scientific and engineering challenge for making quantum computing useful," he said. The Quantum Insider reports the institute's agenda as identifying the obstacles to scaling error-corrected machines and making error correction more practical and efficient, optimising across physical qubits, control electronics and algorithm implementation. Particular attention goes to erasure qubits, which that report describes as specially designed qubits acting as "flags that signal exactly where and when an error has occurred" and credits to work pioneered by members of the PRACTIQAL team. No error-rate or threshold figure is attached to that work in the announcement.

A five-year renewal for quantum simulation

The NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation, or RQS, has been renewed at $37.5m for five years effective September 1, 2026, according to Duke's announcement of August 25. The institute is anchored at the University of Maryland and co-led by Duke and Princeton. Harvard joins the collaboration for this phase, alongside existing partners Yale and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Mohammad Hafezi of Maryland, the university's Minta Martin Professor, takes over as director for the new phase. Kenneth Brown, Michael J. Fitzpatrick Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Duke Quantum Center, is the principal investigator at Duke, where Duke says seven faculty are affiliated with the institute. Duke describes the next phase's emphasis as quantum simulation engineering - moving toward quantum technologies that are increasingly scalable and capable of addressing important scientific problems, including the constituent particles of matter and how quantum systems interact with their environments.

Reading the announcement carefully

Two cautions apply. First, the eight-institute total and the per-award band come from the NSF announcement, while the specific figures for MARQUIS, PRACTIQAL and RQS come from the lead universities and from trade coverage; NSF's own page breaks out no individual award amounts and names no lead universities. The $27.9m MARQUIS figure sits inside the agency's approximately $28m-to-$37m band, but the two $37.5m awards sit slightly above the top of it - a discrepancy neither NSF nor the universities explain, and one reason not to treat the agency's range as authoritative for any single institute. Second, published summaries of which institutes are new and which are renewals do not entirely agree - the NSF says three are newly formed, MARQUIS is described as new by Princeton and RQS as a renewal by Duke, but the new-versus-renewal labelling for the remaining institutes varies between accounts. Anyone building a table from these announcements should go to the individual award notices rather than the aggregate write-ups.

For the listed quantum companies, none of this is revenue. It is upstream capability, and the transmission mechanism to industry runs through graduate students, fabrication recipes and the equipment vendors sitting on the advisory boards. The nearest-term commercial read is in that last group: an institute chartered to reinvent superconducting fabrication over five years is, among other things, a five-year demand signal for deposition, etch and cryogenic tooling. No investment advice is offered here.