Australian-founded quantum companies Diraq and PsiQuantum are among nine recipients of US$2 billion in CHIPS Act letters of intent announced overnight, with US government equity stakes attached to every deal.
Diraq has signed a letter of intent for up to US$38 million from the CHIPS Research and Development Office to scale silicon-based fault-tolerant quantum processors.
PsiQuantum’s letter for US$100 million is earmarked for photonic components quantum approach.
Diraq founder and CEO Andrew Dzurak gave a nod to the US government’s historical work on research into quantum technologies.
“The US Government has played an important role for over 25 years in funding silicon quantum research through entities such as the US Army Research Office and more recently DARPA,” he said.
“The foundational advancements that came from this work underpin Diraq’s technology today.
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PsiQuantum’s co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dr Pete Shadbolt said the letter signing built on “years of collaboration” with the US government.
“The semiconductor industry helped make PsiQuantum’s path to fault-tolerant quantum computing possible, and now PsiQuantum’s scalable breakthroughs in silicon photonics will in turn create new possibilities for the future of computing,” he said.
IBM and GlobalFoundries are set to receive the lion’s share of the announced funding with deals of US$1 billion and US$375 million respectively.
For IBM, the money is slated for a new quantum foundry in New York.
GlobalFoundries will use the cash to launch a new business called Quantum Technology Solutions.
GlobalFoundries’s CTO Gregg Bartlett shouted out its manufacturing partner Diraq, saying it was helping build “a trusted domestic ecosystem” for quantum tech.
“As quantum computing enters its industrial phase, the challenge shifts from scientific discovery to engineering and scale, making reliable access to advanced semiconductor infrastructure essential,” he said.
“We’re proud to partner with Diraq to advance silicon-based quantum processors, leveraging our cryo-CMOS quantum capabilities and broad technology portfolio under one roof to enable quantum systems at scale.”
Five other companies, including publicly traded D-Wave, Rigetti and Infleqtion, plus Atom Computing and Quantinuum, each receive around US$100 million.
In exchange for the funding, the US government will take a minority equity stake in each of the nine recipients — an approach Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has previously used in deals with Intel and rare-earths miner MP Materials.
Diraq, spun out of UNSW Sydney in 2022, builds quantum processors using silicon “quantum dot” technology — the same CMOS manufacturing process that produces conventional semiconductors.
In February, Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund tipped in $20 million; total funding including grants is past US$137 million.
Diraq was also shortlisted for Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative in November 2025 and has US offices in Palo Alto and Chicago, with Los Angeles soon to follow.
“Silicon-based processors are the most economical and scalable approach to utility-scale quantum computing,” Dzurak said.
“By scaling our CMOS qubit technology in the United States, we are defining the industrial standard for the next era of supercomputing and cementing the nation’s role as a global architect of fault-tolerant quantum systems.”
PsiQuantum was founded in 2016 by Brisbane-born physicists Jeremy O’Brien and Terry Rudolph.
The company is headquartered in Palo Alto but has been the recipient of more than $940 million in combined federal and Queensland funding to build a utility-scale quantum computer in Brisbane — the largest single bet any Australian government has made on a single tech company.
