Last week, the US government announced a $2 billion investment in quantum computing companies, allocating $100 million to each startup in exchange for equity in the companies. These can be make-or-break investments for many companies that are potentially years away from a product that could find widespread use. But a member of the US Congress is now arguing that those deals are illegal, because Congress did not allocate the money for this purpose – instead, it was intended to support public research into semiconductors.
But the biggest chunk of the money will go to a company that would not exist if it had not received government support. Enderon will be founded with $1 billion each from IBM and the government, and will inherit personnel and IP from IBM. It will serve as a foundry to build quantum processing units and contract out its services to IBM and any other company that wants access to cutting-edge hardware.
Are any of these legal?
Ranking Member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) made it clear that she is not happy with how the government is using its money to support this technology.
“This announcement is illegal and troubling on many levels,” Lofgren said the day after the announcement. He explained that the money being used for the deal comes from the Chips and Science Act, which was passed during the Biden administration and was allocated “specifically for microelectronics R&D, with a focus on semiconductor technology.”
That technology only partially, at best, overlaps with the technology used in quantum processors. Furthermore, Lofgren says the money was allocated to foster public/private research partnerships, which these deals certainly are not. Finally, he noted that the largest amount would go to IBM, and he suggested that a former IBM executive (Dario Gil, current Under Secretary for Science at the Department of Energy) was involved in the negotiations that led to the deal.
None of this, he said, means that quantum processing technology is a bad investment or that any of these companies are not worthy of support. She simply argues that Congress would need to allocate funds to do so.
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