In May 2026, the US Department of Commerce announced roughly $2 billion in planned CHIPS and Science Act funding for the quantum computing industry, spread across nine companies. On September 8, it converted most of that into real contracts. D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, Quantinuum, PsiQuantum, and GlobalFoundries each signed a definitive agreement for up to $100 million, with the federal government taking a minority, non-controlling stake in each company as a condition of the money.

Where each company stands

Here’s where each company from the May cohort sits as of September 10, 2026:

Company	May 2026 amount	Hardware focus	Status
IBM	$1 billion	Superconducting wafer foundry	Letter of intent only
GlobalFoundries	$375 million	Domestic quantum foundry, multiple modalities	Signed, Sept 8
Infleqtion	$100 million	Neutral-atom	Letter of intent only
Diraq	Up to $38 million	Silicon spin	Letter of intent only
D-Wave	$100 million	Annealing and gate-model superconducting	Signed, Sept 8
Rigetti	$100 million	Superconducting	Signed, Sept 8
Quantinuum	$100 million	Trapped-ion	Signed, Sept 8
PsiQuantum	$100 million	Photonic	Signed, Sept 8

Five of the nine companies have converted their letter of intent into a binding award. The rest, including the largest dollar figure on the list, IBM’s $1 billion, are still sitting at the promise stage five months later. That’s worth remembering any time this round of funding gets described as if it were all already spent.

What the market did

What’s genuinely interesting is comparing how the market reacted to the announcement versus the signature. 

The promise produced a sharp single-day rally. The binding agreement, months later, produced a much more modest one, which could mean that investors already priced it in (and the award was never in doubt). This might seem obvious, but remember that not every deal is signed yet. 

Both D-Wave and Rigetti remain well below where they started the year, and a good day on the news recovered only a small piece of that ground.However, when you consider that the government has bought shares at a price that is now 20-30% lower than the date of the announcement, all participating companies are essentially subsidizing the government’s payment. For example, in signing the $100m agreement, D-Wave has paid the Federal government a whopping $27 million to convince the government to purchase their shares. 

Timeline	D-Wave	Rigetti	Quantinuum
May 21 (letter of intent)	+33.4% ($25.74)	+30.6% ($22.04)	Not yet public
Stock Price (May 20)	$19.30	$16.88	Not yet public
Sept 8 (signing)	+5.4% to $17.48	+7.4% to $16.33	+3.9% to $51.56
2026 year to date (Sept 8)	-33%	-26%	IPO’d June 2026
Shares issued to government	7,095,721	7,739,938	2,369,528
Price per share	$14.093	$12.92	~$42.20 (derived)

What they were actually buying

None of these companies needed the cash. D-Wave had about $546 million on hand, and Rigetti had about $541 million. 

One is access: government contracting still runs substantially on relationships, and a signed award with the Department of Commerce is a credential that can open doors in future procurement conversations, even though it guarantees nothing specific. The other is signaling: a CHIPS award functions, in practice, as a public marker that a company has been vetted and taken seriously by a federal agency. That’s a useful thing to point to when courting investors, even though the award itself isn’t a technical certification of anything and doesn’t obligate any future business.

The IonQ comparison

IonQ is the useful counterexample. IonQ didn’t take CHIPS Act money, and it has kept winning government contracts anyway, both before this round of awards and since. That suggests government business doesn’t have to run through this specific program. For IonQ, it apparently doesn’t. For D-Wave, Rigetti, Quantinuum, and PsiQuantum, none of which has built the same track record of winning government work on its own, the signaling value of a CHIPS award may matter more than the $100 million itself.

The fine print

The money isn’t paid out all at once, and the schedules aren’t identical. 

• D-Wave’s first tranche, $53.55 million, became available immediately after the award date, with the remaining $46.4 million split across four installments tied to milestones. 
• Rigetti is less front-loaded: $43.9 million at the award date, then $29.9 million and $26.2 million on its two milestone tranches. 

These milestones’ requirements are not public. D-Wave describes the categories in general terms: “installation of tools and equipment, fabrication of prototypes, process integration, calibration and benchmarking”, but the criteria themselves are redacted 

There’s an interesting repurchase clause. If the Commerce Dept terminates for convenience, meaning it simply decides to stop, D-Wave and Rigetti can buy back a block of the government’s shares for an aggregate price of $1.00 (not $1 per share). If D-Wave misses its milestones, Commerce demands repayment as a debt and explicitly cannot forfeit the securities. 

Commerce agreed not to vote Rigetti’s shares outside a few structural matters, it can’t sell D-Wave’s to a competitor without consent, and it’s locked from transferring during the termination window. 

Why these companies

There’s no public scorecard ranking these companies against each other or explaining exactly why these four were first to sign while five others are still waiting. Commerce has described its approach as a portfolio strategy: spreading money across different hardware types so that no single technical bet determines the outcome for the whole program. Each award is tied to a specific, named engineering problem rather than functioning as general operating capital, and the standard CHIPS process runs through an application, a government due-diligence review, and then one-on-one negotiation to final terms.

Unlike the DARPA evaluation last year, there is no evidence that these awards constitute government confirmation and evaluation of the technology.