IBM (NYSE: IBM) has committed more than $10 billion over the next five years to its quantum-computing roadmap, an Armonk announcement that funds everything from research and capex to manufacturing scale, ecosystem partnerships and M&A. The pledge is designed to carry IBM from today's commercial systems to IBM Quantum Starling in 2029 — what the company calls the world's first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer.
Starling, Blue Jay and a US foundry
"The quantum era is no longer ahead of us, it has started," chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said in the release. IBM already operates more than 90 quantum computers globally — more, it says, than the rest of the industry combined — at sites including IBM quantum centers in New York and Germany, Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, the University of Tokyo, Yonsei, BasQ in Spain, and forthcoming systems in Chicago and India's Amaravati Quantum Valley.
The investment also funds Anderon, a $1 billion-plus pure-play quantum wafer foundry IBM is building with backing from the US Department of Commerce, plus the path to IBM Quantum Blue Jay — a 2,000-qubit machine targeted at 1 billion quantum operations per circuit.
From software to advantage
IBM says its Qiskit software stack is now used by nearly 70% of quantum developers and has executed more than 4 trillion quantum circuits. The company is confident that partners running on IBM hardware will demonstrate quantum advantage in 2026, pointing to recent work with Cleveland Clinic and RIKEN modeling a 12,635-atom protein, and university experiments synthesizing a never-before-seen molecule.
A widening capital race
The $10 billion figure matches the scale of capital flowing into the wider quantum sector. Quantinuum priced a $1.68 billion IPO earlier this month, France's Quobly raised €115 million for silicon qubits, and Pasqal just inaugurated Italy's first neutral-atom system at CINECA. IBM's pledge is the largest single corporate quantum commitment on the table — and effectively a five-year defence of its lead.
Reporting based on coverage from IBM Newsroom and the IBM Quantum roadmap.