The Israel Innovation Authority opened a NIS 100 million (about $33 million) call for proposals on Monday to build a national quantum computing R&D infrastructure - a multi-platform testbed intended to give Israeli industry and academia access to at least three different quantum processing technologies inside one program.
A three-technology national hub
The winning consortium will have to integrate hardware from at least three qubit modalities under one roof, then run benchmarking, algorithm work, error-correction methodology and applications development across the full stack. Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology Gila Gamliel framed the call as "an investment in Israel's resilience and its ability to lead the economy of the 21st century." IIA CEO Dror Bin said it would give companies and researchers a state-of-the-art R&D layer to turn scientific knowledge into commercial advantage without waiting for a single winning platform to emerge.
Timelines, service levels and Q-Day
Proposals close October 8. The chosen operator has 18 months to fully stand up the infrastructure and must begin delivering R&D services - cloud-based QPU access, hardware testing and algorithm evaluation - within the first 12 months. The paperwork imposes explicit service-level objectives: deployment milestones per technology, performance floors and a rapid resolution clock for critical failures. Because "no single quantum computing technology has yet demonstrated clear superiority," the infrastructure must keep upgrading each platform in step with the global market.
A busy 24 hours for national quantum bets
The Israeli call landed on the same July 20 news cycle as Sandia and Quantinuum's Nature certification of the 98-qubit Helios and BTQ and TIDAL PWR's trusted quantum data center architecture, and a fortnight after BTQ's QPerfect close. It slots into a broader wave of sovereign quantum programmes - from the UK's teraQuOp mission to Singapore's National Quantum Office - that are effectively pricing quantum as national infrastructure rather than a science project.
Reporting based on coverage from The Quantum Insider, HPCwire, Times of Israel and the Israel Innovation Authority.