IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry

https://futurumgroup.com/insights/2-billion-chips-act-investment-in-quantum-bets-on-ibms-300mm-superconducting-silicon/

by rbanffy • 2 months ago

158 73 2 months ago

stogot• 2 months ago

The article talks about IBM spreading bets to other techniques. Reminds me to ponder again. Has Microsoft retracted their sketchy quantum claims about inventing new states of matter in the past year? https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/03/12/microsofts-qu...

madanparas• 2 months ago

The real story isn't the $2B. It's that the foundry is standalone, so other quantum hardware companies can use it. Shared infrastructure beats nine separate research cleanrooms.

Zigurd• 2 months ago

Is there enough agreement regarding what is a quantum chip, and what process technology is necessary to make one?

imglorp• 2 months ago

Is there any agreement regarding real applications that warrant fab volume or is this still speculation?

ghaff4• 2 months ago

I've been out of the space for a bit. IBM has been betting on the engineered superconducting approach, which makes sense given their background, but there are other options, often for potentially different problem areas. Need to dive back in.

rbanffy3• 2 months ago

I guess it's a balance. If you think their process makes workable chips for your designs, then you can use it. If you can't adapt your design to what they can build, then you need to build your own foundry. Chances are a reliable supplier will push the market in the direction of their process.

If we had someone making GaAs processors in the 1980s for a price competitive with their silicon counterparts and with a long-term roadmap, we'd have very different computers now. And some extra toxic waste problems.

gaze• 2 months ago

For superconducting qubits, yes. For other architectures everyone is doing their own thing.

dvh• 2 months ago

Can the chips they plan to make there run Shor?

bawolff4• 2 months ago

If they could in any meaningful way, i'm pretty sure the press release would have lead with that.

upofadown• 2 months ago

From the article:

IBM is developing four custom ASICs — a decoder, a two-qubit gate controller, a single-qubit controller, and an amplifier — designed to handle quantum control at scale, with these circuits expected to converge around 2029 at the point where power consumption becomes manageable at up to 3 megawatts per system.

The current hotness seems to be based on creating pairs of entangled qubits based on what might be realistically achieved with error correction. Shor's requires thousands of entangled qubits (something like 4000 for 2K RSA and 1500 for 256 bit elliptic curves).

So unless someone comes up with a way to break cryptography using pairs of entangled qubits then this probably isn't relevant.

caminante• 2 months ago

This is a pro-IBM piece.

I'm surprised it has zero mention of potential advantages of trapped ion despite being superior on stability windows, accuracy, and operating temps.

I also appreciate the disclosure about AI generated content, but this article gets too repetitive.

DeathArrow• 2 months ago

Two questions:

-do the chips help with inference?

-can you run Doom on the chips?

rbanffy3• 2 months ago

Being for quantum computing, the answer is both yes and no. You need to collapse the wave function to pick one.

ArchieScrivener• 2 months ago

A bailout for a company that stopped innovating and instead has been inventing new ways to create middle management and bureaucracy.

So much for capitalism.

postalcoder• 2 months ago

Seems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective.

I’m not IBMologist but I do remember how IBM pushed Watson when it was clear that upper management had no idea what Watson actually was. Regardless of the viability of the underlying technology, it’s best to keep such things away from the consultants.

Also, article is very difficult to read. Bad typeface, spacing, coherence and prose. I found the press release less strained.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/ibm-and-u-s-department-of-commerce-...

horns4lyfe• 2 months ago

Well ya, it’s an Indian IT sweatshop at this point.

senthil_rajasek• 2 months ago

I now work in an I.T dept of a financial company in U.S and I've also worked at software companies in India.

They are all sweatshops these days.

Traubenfuchs• 2 months ago

I remember when watson was touted as soon to be replacement for doctors more than 10 years ago…

https://www.henricodolfing.ch/en/case-study-20-the-4-billion...

MichaelZuo• 2 months ago

I don’t understand why IBM never tried to make amends and reclaim their former credibility somehow.

Do IBM decison makers intentionally want to have that hang over the whole firm and be the butt of jokes?

hibikir• 2 months ago

It's not that the cheating stayed with IBM: Ray Dalio hired David Ferrucci out of Watson to try to make an AI for Bridgewater. The pitch was to make it a very accurate people assesor, but in practice the goal was to tell you who agreed the most with Ray Dalio. The team spent years of their lives taking Bridgewater's money, building basically linear regression on questionnaires, and calling it advanced AI on interviews. It's all documented in The Fund.

RaftPeople• 2 months ago

Seems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective.

I'm not understanding your logic, can you explain?

What I see with the program and amounts companies were awarded is some level of acknowledgment of the current state of quantum research (i.e. IBM is generally considered the leader) and their pragmatic approach that piggy-backs on current technologies (for obvious speed+cost benefits).

hiddencost• 2 months ago

IBM is generally considered the leader

You must not talk to competent people. IBM is very experienced at this grift. I remember when I used to go to conferences in a different field and IBM would announce "state of the art" results that were very obviously done by cheating (making an ensemble model and tuning the weights on the test set). Everyone doing real work would ignore them, and then they'd go sell to clueless midcap companies on the basis of that announcement.

DANmode• 2 months ago

A speculative growth play,

or an innovation play?

Keep IBM people & policies away from either, to succeed.

roncesvalles• 2 months ago

It seems more like they're positioning for the quantum spinoff to achieve meme stock status.

pjmlp3• 2 months ago

I’m not IBMologist but I do remember how IBM pushed Watson when it was clear that upper management had no idea what Watson actually was. Regardless of the viability of the underlying technology.

So pretty much like any other AI company in 2026 hunting for VC money?

mathattack• 2 months ago

Interesting. My observation on IBM is their entire business model is:

1 - Audit your customers

2 - Buy back shares

3 - Force early retirements

It was easy to see why Watson failed in that environment. The revenue was “We’ll let you out of the $6mm audit bill if you buy $2mm of Watson”. Companies would agree, install better asset management, and never put Watson into production.

I couldn’t imagine Quantum Comouting surviving there. Spinning it off the best play.

rr808• 2 months ago

Their business model is more like make a lot of noise about high tech, then hire h1bs to do routine IT work their corporate customers do.

sublinear• 2 months ago

Their corporate customers also do that to their own customers.

coredog642• 2 months ago

That's Kyndryl: They spun it off into it's own entity after "IBM Global Services" had such a (deservedly) poor reputation that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for clients and employees. Not that Kyndryl is any better, but it's enough of a rebrand that you might fool decision makers for the few minutes that it takes to get them to buy in.

pjmlp3• 2 months ago

Also buy Red-Hat and in the process own quite a few FOSS projects.

pjmlp3• 2 months ago

A business model that currently the Linux ecosystem benefits from, between Linux kernel, GCC, Wayland, GNOME, systemd, Java, Go, Rust.

fsckboy• 2 months ago

they've just spun off the first quantum computer pure-play, the highest of techs, the greenest of green-fields, and your observation is "IBM doesn't do this"

amelius• 2 months ago

First? Europeans are already producing quantum processors at research scale, soon industrial scale.

https://quantware.com/news/quantware-raises-178-million

coredog642• 2 months ago

Finally, I can factor 21 at an industrial scale!

andrewstuart• 2 months ago

IBM is such a weird company what even IS IBM these days?

For the most part it seems to be rent-a-programmer “consulting”.

But then articles like this come up where they seem to still have research capability.

They bailed out of pc hardware long ago, do they still do mainframes - maybe mainframes don’t exist any more?

AlotOfReading• 2 months ago

IBM still sells extremely POWERful systems, but they don't seem particularly interested in expanding the market.

I once had a conversation with a director of that division about why it wasn't on the market. It basically came down to the existing customers being willing to pay such exorbitant amounts for each system after all the support contracts that "normal" markups like Nvidia and Intel enjoy were too paltry in comparison.

throwawaypath• 2 months ago

They also charge you for every instruction cycle on the machines (look up MIPS licensing) you own. Imagine if NVIDIA started doing that with their GPUs: spend $2500 on a GPU and then pay NVIDIA a royalty fee for every hour of workload you put on it.

alienbaby• 2 months ago

they've also still got their storage stuff. I always wondered why that isn't doing better, it seemed pretty damn good when I've ended up working iwth it.

Scubabear68• 2 months ago

I am not surprised, but disappointed, to see something like the CHIPS Act be used for something which is still in ultra-super-unbelievably-early-research-phase. Put more candidly, something not currently useful like Quantum computing.

Looks like just a handout to IBM.

osnium123• 2 months ago

The administration fired the original CHIPs Act team and so the new team might not be up to speed.

izanton2• 2 months ago

I don't really understand how quantum chips work, but it's so interesting and cool (or it's not)

ktallett2• 2 months ago

It massively depends on what type of quantum chip it is, so often the confusion is that there is no one specific method. Especially as we are too early in the development cycle to have a clear winner (although Photonic computing is gaining traction).

izanton2• 2 months ago

I try to follow the motto of my university quantum physics professor: if you feel like quantum mechanics is making you more certain you understand it, you’re probably wrong and need to start over.

But as I understand it, the most "basic" approach now with qubit-based computers is to select the most popular answer across many runs and treat it as the "right" one.

DivingForGold• 2 months ago

Bet this got Elon Musk's attention, his dreams about his TerraFab.

_s_a_m_• 2 months ago

IBM does not disappoint with their yearly meme posts about AI and Quantum and what not

bluesounddirect• 2 months ago

I would like to believe this is a cover story for IBM to make parts for the DoD latest weapon . I would like to imagine its a cover to make parts for some new government super computer. But its IBM its probably nothing even close to that . Its more likely a nice way to get the stock back at $315 and make nothing.

alsetmusic• 2 months ago

US's big bet on quantum computing may not be entirely legal[0]

0. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/uss-big-bet-on-q...

archonis• 2 months ago

I wonder how many people IBM will layoff to celebrate this one.

IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry

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