Commerce Department Finalizes Up to $100 Million CHIPS R&D Award for Atom Computing
The U.S. Department of Commerce announced on November 13 that its CHIPS Research and Development Office has signed a final R&D award of up to $100 million under the CHIPS and Science Act with Atom Computing, a neutral-atom quantum computing company, the National Institute of Standards and Technology said.
The award will accelerate several strategic R&D initiatives for semiconductors and related technology supporting utility-scale, commercially useful neutral-atom quantum computers, including the hardware development and systems integration needed to manipulate, control and address tens of thousands of qubits, and to validate their performance. Atom Computing, based in Boulder, Colorado, builds quantum computers from arrays of optically trapped neutral atoms and has demonstrated systems with more than 1,000 qubits.
The final award follows a letter of intent announced earlier this year. Ben Bloom, Atom Computing's founder and chief executive, said quantum computing is at a critical inflection point where scientific breakthroughs must rapidly translate into commercial reality, and that the $100 million contract lets the company aggressively scale the engineering required to bring fault-tolerant quantum computing to market and ensure the United States leads the transition into the utility-scale era. The company said the funding will develop critical technologies in-house, expand parallel engineering and testbed infrastructure, and strengthen R&D collaboration with key supply chain partners.
Atom Computing was also recently selected as the only neutral-atom company to advance to Stage C of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, which carries potential funding of up to $300 million. In 2025 the company sold its first commercial on-premises quantum computer to QuNorth, a Nordic quantum initiative.
(Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology)
Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：量子计算机硬件实景（资料图，非 Atom Computing 的设备）。瑞典 Chalmers 理工大学量子计算机，2017年，CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons，本图已裁为 16:9。 / Photo: Quantum computer hardware (file photo, not Atom Computing equipment): the quantum computer at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, 2017. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped to 16:9.
