The US is investing $2B into quantum computing as concerns grow over Bitcoin encryption vulnerabilities.
Bitcoin News
The US Department of Commerce has announced it will invest more than $2 billion in quantum computing companies. The funding covers nine firms, with $1 billion of the total going to IBM to build a new quantum chip manufacturing facility on US soil.
The planned facility will be called Anderon, and it will be based in Albany, New York. Its primary focus will be 300-millimeter superconducting quantum wafer manufacturing. The Commerce Department will contribute $1 billion in CHIPS Act incentives. IBM will provide a matching $1 billion in cash, intellectual property, manufacturing assets, and personnel.
"With the support of the US Department of Commerce, Anderon will be well-positioned to fuel America's fast-growing quantum technology industry," said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the investments would create thousands of jobs and advance the country's quantum capabilities. IBM's quantum roadmap, published in November 2025, targets the delivery of a large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029.
Other Recipients and the Encryption Threat
GlobalFoundries is set to receive $375 million. Atom Computing, D-Wave, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum, and Rigetti are each slated for $100 million. Quantum startup Diraq will receive $38 million. The government will take equity stakes in each participating company in exchange for the funding.
Superconducting qubits store information using tiny electrical circuits cooled to near absolute zero. A standard computer bit can only be a 0 or a 1. A qubit can exist in multiple states at the same time. That property allows quantum computers to solve certain problems far faster than conventional machines.
That same capability poses a long-term concern for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). Both networks rely on elliptic curve cryptography to protect wallets and authorize transactions. Researchers warn that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive a private key from a publicly exposed key. Once funds are moved in that scenario, there is no mechanism to reverse the transaction.
Quantum security firm Project Eleven warned in a recent report that a computer capable of breaking that encryption could arrive as early as 2030. Google researchers have separately said that future quantum systems may require fewer qubits than previously estimated to crack modern cryptography. Both findings have accelerated concern among blockchain developers.
Citi analysts said on May 21 that BTC may face greater long-term exposure to this threat than ETH. They pointed to Bitcoin's slower governance process as a barrier to rapid protocol upgrades. The bank estimated that roughly 6.7 to 7 million BTC, up to one-third of the total supply, already sits in wallets with publicly exposed keys.
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