US Awards $2 Billion in Quantum Computing Equity Stakes, Compressing the Timeline for Bitcoin’s Biggest Security Risk

The Trump administration on Thursday awarded $2 billion in equity stakes to nine quantum computing companies through the U.S. Department of Commerce, the largest direct federal investment in quantum hardware and a signal that Washington views the technology as close enough to warrant industrial-policy-scale spending.

IBM will receive $1 billion to establish a new company called Anderon dedicated to manufacturing quantum computer chips in the U.S., and will invest an additional $1 billion of its own capital in the facility. GlobalFoundries gets $375 million to build a domestic factory capable of producing components for multiple quantum architectures. The chipmaker launched a new business called Quantum Technology Solutions in connection with the deal, with the government taking approximately 1% equity. D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, Infleqtion, and Quantinuum will each receive roughly $100 million, and Australian startup Diraq gets up to $38 million. The government takes minority equity stakes in all nine.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

“With today’s investments in quantum computing, the Trump administration is leading the world into a new era of American innovation,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said. Infleqtion CEO Matthew Kinsella told Reuters the funding validates that “quantum computing is coming much faster than anybody thinks.” The awards are funded through the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022.

For bitcoin, the acceleration is existential.

Google’s Quantum AI team published a paper in April estimating that fewer than 500,000 physical qubits could crack bitcoin’s 256-bit elliptic curve encryption, a roughly 20-fold reduction from prior estimates. Separate Caltech research suggested a neutral-atom quantum system with roughly 26,000 qubits could break the same encryption in about 10 days. Citi warned last week that approximately 6.9 million BTC, worth about $450 billion at current prices, sit in addresses with already-exposed public keys, including roughly 1.1 million attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.

The bitcoin community remains divided on how to respond. BIP-361, backed by Casa CTO Jameson Lopp, proposes freezing quantum-vulnerable addresses on a five-year timeline, though critics, including Charles Hoskinson, have called it a disguised hard fork that cannot recover 1.7 million BTC. Separately, AmericanFortress, backed by an $8 million seed round, unveiled a patent-pending post-quantum signature scheme using zero-knowledge proofs that it says can protect dormant wallets without mass fund migrations. A “quantum canary” counterproposal from BitMEX Research would let a bounty fund prove the threat is real before triggering any network restrictions.