The U.S. Department of Commerce has signed letters of intent with nine companies to distribute $2 billion in federal funding aimed at cementing American leadership in quantum computing, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The announcement marks one of the largest single federal commitments to the nascent technology, which promises to solve problems in drug discovery, cryptography, and materials science that today's conventional computers cannot tackle in any practical timeframe.
Nine companies are in line to receive the funding, though the official NIST announcement did not publicly name all recipients at the letter-of-intent stage. Letters of intent are a preliminary step — they signal serious negotiation but are not yet binding contracts.
Notably absent from the recipient list, according to reporting aggregated by 富途牛牛, is Google, whose quantum computing division has produced some of the field's most-publicized milestones, including its 2019 claim of "quantum supremacy." The reasons for Google's exclusion were not detailed in the available sources.
The move comes amid an intensifying race between the United States and China to dominate next-generation computing infrastructure. Quantum computers exploit the physics of subatomic particles to process certain calculations exponentially faster than classical machines, making them a strategic priority for both economic competitiveness and national security.
If the funding translates into deployable hardware and software, it could accelerate the timeline for quantum computers moving from research labs into real-world applications — a transition that would reshape industries from pharmaceuticals to finance.