Last week, the United States government announced 2 billion dollars in investments in quantum computing companies, allocating $100 million each to a variety of startups in exchange for shares in the companies. These could be make-or-break investments for many companies that are likely years away from having a product that could see widespread use. But a member of the US Congress now argues that those agreements are illegal, since Congress did not appropriate the money for this purpose; instead, it was intended to support public research in semiconductors.
But most of the money would go to a company that likely wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for government support. Anderon will be created with $1 billion each from IBM and the government and will inherit IBM personnel and intellectual property. It will serve as a foundry to manufacture quantum processing units and will contract its services to IBM and any other company that wants access to cutting-edge hardware.
Is any of this legal?
Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, made it clear that she is not happy with the way the government is using her money to support this technology.
“This announcement is illegal and concerning on many levels,” Lofgren said a day after the announcement, noting that the money being used for the deal comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, which was passed during the Biden administration and was allocated “specifically for R&D in microelectronics, with a focus on semiconductor technology.”
That technology only partially overlaps, at best, with that used in quantum processors. Additionally, Lofgren says the money was allocated to encourage public-private research partnerships, something these agreements are decidedly not. Finally, he noted that the largest sum of money will go to IBM and suggested that a former IBM executive (Darío Gil, current Undersecretary of Science at the Department of Energy) was involved in the negotiations that led to this agreement.
None of this, he noted, means that quantum processing technology is a bad investment or that any of these companies don’t deserve support. She simply argues that doing so would require Congress to appropriate the money to do it.
