Qubic's CA$1.5M Ottawa Award Is a Contract to Buy Hardware, Not a Grant

by Vikram Desai · September 11, 2026

Funding & Deals Reporter, Frontier Tech Wire

Qubic, a Canadian maker of cryogenic microwave amplifiers, said on September 11 that it had won a federal award worth CA$1.5 million under Innovative Solutions Canada's Testing Stream, under which it will deliver nine kinetic inductance travelling-wave parametric amplifiers along with supporting components and software. The Quantum Insider, which put the figure at roughly US$1.1 million, and SpaceQ both reported the award the same day.

The word doing the most work in that sentence is Testing Stream, and it is worth being precise about what it is. Read against the Innovative Solutions Canada open-calls page run by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, the Testing Stream is not a grant programme. The page states that the stream aims to procure, test and evaluate innovative late-stage pre-commercial prototypes, and its mandatory evaluation criteria require a bidder's proposal to align with a mandate under which Canada procures, through a contract, the bidder's innovation for the purpose of testing it in an operational environment. Money changes hands for goods delivered and tested, not as a research subsidy, and a federal organisation takes delivery of the hardware.

That distinction matters for how the award should be read. It is evidence that a government buyer has agreed to put nine of Qubic's amplifiers into a test environment. It is not evidence that the amplifiers have passed that test, and no evaluation result exists yet to report. Qubic's chief executive and co-founder, Jerome Bourassa, framed the award in a statement that The Quantum Insider and SpaceQ carry in identical wording, saying the real-world applications for the technology are both tangible and strategically important on many levels; SpaceQ's fuller version of the same statement adds that quantum computing requires hardware innovations such as Qubic's amplifier, which unlocks new physical capabilities, in order to reach utility scale in the medium term.

There is also a figure that neither report explains. The Testing Stream caps published on the ISED open-calls page are CA$550,000 per contract for the standard component and CA$1,150,000 for the military component, in both cases excluding applicable taxes, shipping and travel and living expenses. The CA$1.5 million reported for Qubic exceeds both. Whether the award is a single contract awarded under a call with different terms, or more than one contract reported in aggregate, is not stated in either account, and neither names the federal department that will do the testing.

The two reports also differ on schedule. The Quantum Insider describes delivery and project milestones expected by spring 2027. SpaceQ describes deliveries beginning in the autumn of 2026 with integration and evaluation completed by early 2027. Both are plans; neither is a delivery that has happened.

The hardware is the interesting part. A kinetic inductance travelling-wave parametric amplifier gets its nonlinearity from the kinetic inductance of a superconducting transmission line rather than from Josephson junctions, which is the more common route to near-quantum-limited microwave amplification in superconducting qubit readout chains. Qubic's devices use a niobium alloy and operate at around 4 kelvin.

The reason a company can build a business on this is thermal budget. By Qubic's own account, the semiconductor low-noise amplifiers and high-electron-mobility transistors conventionally used at the 4 kelvin stage generate something close to half the total heat load a dilution refrigerator has to remove. Readout amplification is, in effect, a per-qubit tax paid in cooling power, and cooling power is what caps how many qubits fit in a fridge.

The performance numbers in circulation need labels. The figure repeated in this week's coverage, and in Qubic's May announcement with Quantum Machines, is heat dissipation below 0.1 milliwatts at 4 kelvin; both present it as a projection for the device rather than a measurement taken from one. A December 12, 2025 write-up in Embedded listed a fuller set, and its verbs are the point: Qubic, it said, is working hard to achieve an amplifier gain of 20 dB over a bandwidth between 4 and 12 GHz while producing one to ten microwatts of heat. Those three specifications are explicitly design targets for a prototype, not measured results. Two further claims in the same piece, a ten-thousand-fold reduction in heat dissipation and roughly double the number of qubits cooled in a dilution refrigerator, carry no such qualifier at all; they are vendor claims, not independently verified benchmarks. Quantum Computing Report described the amplifier in September 2025 as still in the prototyping and testing phase, with market release planned for 2026. No peer-reviewed characterisation or independent benchmark of a shipping device has been published.

Qubic itself is a spin-off of two of Canada's quantum research centres, the Institut Quantique at Université de Sherbrooke and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, with offices in Sherbrooke, Quebec and Waterloo, Ontario.

Its funding record is short and public. In September 2025 it took CA$925,000, reported at about US$687,000, through the FABrIC programme administered by CMC, described at the time as part of a CA$2.5 million project to develop cryogenic amplifiers made from quantum materials. That one was a grant, and so a different instrument from this week's contract. The Quantum Insider reports a $3.5 million seed round in June 2026; SpaceQ describes the same round as oversubscribed and closed earlier in 2026. Neither account states the currency of the round.

The commercial precedent for this week's award came on May 26, 2026, when Qubic said it would supply KI-TWPA amplifiers to Quantum Machines: three versions, each building on the performance of the last, to be delivered by the end of 2026 and evaluated in cryogenic systems. No price was disclosed.

What would move this from a supply-chain story to a measurement story is narrow and checkable: published noise temperature and gain data taken on the delivered units rather than on a prototype; a named testing department and a public evaluation outcome from the Testing Stream contract; and confirmation of whether the Quantum Machines units shipped by the end of 2026 as described. Until one of those lands, Qubic has purchase orders, not results.