Commerce

Commerce Department Signs Up to $100 Million CHIPS Quantum Deal With Atom Computing, Taking an Equity Stake

The Commerce Department has signed a contract worth up to $100 million with Atom Computing, a Boulder, Colorado company that builds quantum computers out of neutral atoms, to speed up work on fault-tolerant, utility-scale machines. The deal turns a letter of intent from May into a signed agreement.

That letter was one of nine the department signed on May 21, 2026, worth $2.013 billion in total under the CHIPS and Science Act. The money comes through the CHIPS Research and Development Office at NIST. Two of the nine are foundries. IBM gets $1 billion for a quantum wafer foundry and GlobalFoundries $375 million. The other seven are quantum computer builders, picked so that each major hardware approach gets a bet: neutral atom, trapped ion, superconducting, photonic and silicon spin. Atom Computing is the neutral-atom pick. Two other Colorado firms, Infleqtion and Quantinuum, got $100 million letters as well.

The equity piece

This isn’t a plain grant. Under the letters, Commerce takes a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each company. In Atom Computing’s case that means common stock worth $100 million, issued to the department at a 15% discount. It’s the same playbook the administration has used elsewhere in CHIPS money: the government wants a share of the upside if the bet pays off. For a private quantum startup, having Washington on the cap table is new territory.

What the money pays for

Atom Computing lists three uses:

  • building critical components in-house, for better performance and reliability and more vertical integration
  • more parallel engineering and testbed capacity, so it can check new designs faster
  • closer R&D work with supply chain partners, aimed at scaling up manufacturing

CEO Ben Bloom says the contract lets the company push hard on the engineering needed to get fault-tolerant machines to market, and keep the U.S. in front as quantum moves to the utility-scale stage.

The DARPA track

Commerce isn’t the only agency backing the company. Atom Computing was recently picked for Stage C of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, the only neutral-atom company to get that far, with potential funding of up to $300 million. QBI is DARPA’s attempt to figure out which quantum designs can actually reach useful scale by the early 2030s, and Stage C is the most demanding round. So two separate parts of the federal government have now looked at the same company and decided to put serious money in.

Track record

The company’s claims to firsts:

  • the first platform with more than 1,000 qubits
  • the first neutral-atom company to show sub-threshold behavior with full, end-to-end quantum error correction over many rounds
  • the first to sell a logical-qubit quantum computer commercially

In 2025 it sold its first on-premises machine to QuNorth, a Nordic quantum program funded by EIFO and the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

Why it matters for Washington

Quantum computing sits high on the national security list because a big enough machine could break the public-key encryption that protects government and commercial data. That is why agencies are already moving to post-quantum cryptography. It also promises gains in chemistry, materials and logistics. Commerce’s quantum portfolio is an industrial policy bet that the U.S. can’t afford to let the hardware lead slip to China or Europe, and that funding several approaches at once beats guessing which one wins.

The open question is the same one that hangs over all CHIPS money. Equity stakes and milestone-based payments sound good on paper. Whether the department has the staff and patience to manage a portfolio of deep-tech startups over a decade is another matter.