PsiQuantum has signed definitive documentation on a $100 million U.S. Department of Commerce award under the CHIPS and Science Act, converting a May 2026 letter of intent into a firm co-investment aimed at scaling domestic manufacturing of the critical photonic components that underpin its fault-tolerant quantum computer.
From LOI To Definitive $100M Award
The award, finalized on September 8, 2026, will accelerate R&D and U.S. manufacturability of high-performance optical switches, high-temperature single-photon detectors and advanced packaging — three parts of the stack that PsiQuantum treats as the gating items for utility-scale photonic quantum systems. Federal money is matched by PsiQuantum's own project co-investment, and the company has committed to expanding its California-anchored supply chain and its long-standing partnership with foundry partner GlobalFoundries, which has been producing PsiQuantum's photonic chipsets since 2019.
"America's national security and economic prosperity depend on secure supply chains for cutting-edge technologies," said PsiQuantum CEO Victor Peng. GlobalFoundries CEO Tim Breen framed the deal as evidence that "useful quantum systems will be built on manufacturing that already works at scale."
Stacking Federal Programs Around Photonic Qubits
The Commerce award slots into a widening federal tailwind for PsiQuantum. In July the company signed an expanded $125 million agreement with DARPA under the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative — the same program that is stress-testing rival architectures — as we reported in PsiQuantum's $125M DARPA benchmarking expansion. It has partnered with the Air Force Research Lab since 2022 on silicon-photonics chip manufacturing, and in September teamed with Brookhaven National Lab on fault-tolerant algorithms as covered in PsiQuantum's Brookhaven collaboration on Quantum Genesis.
A CHIPS Pivot Toward Quantum Manufacturing
Commerce has been steadily broadening how it deploys CHIPS Act R&D dollars, using them to seed the manufacturing ecosystems around emerging compute paradigms rather than only classical logic and memory. Related coverage: Quantinuum's $100M CHIPS R&D trapped-ion award. In 2025, PsiQuantum said it spent roughly $200 million with hundreds of U.S. suppliers and vendors across 38 states. The new award is intended to expand that footprint as the company races to bring its Chicago and Brisbane utility-scale sites online before the end of the decade.
Reporting based on coverage from PsiQuantum, The Quantum Insider, HPCwire and Quantum Computing Report.