D-Wave finalises up to $100M from the US Commerce Department for a 100,000-qubit annealer and 10,000-qubit gate-model system

D-Wave Quantum/Gate-model program

D-Wave finalised an agreement for up to $100 million from the US Commerce Department under the CHIPS and Science Act, with the government taking a minority, non-controlling equity stake. The money supports two superconducting systems: a 100,000-qubit annealer and a 10,000-qubit gate-model machine aimed at 100 error-corrected logical qubits running over a million operations.

• Money is paid out as D-Wave hits project milestones and depends on appropriated funds; the department can terminate the award.
• The annealer targets optimisation, materials simulation, blockchain and AI workloads.
• No completion dates were given for either system.
• Annealers solve optimisation problems by letting a system settle into low-energy states; gate-model machines are general-purpose and need error correction.