IBM Takes a Billion-Dollar Step Toward Becoming Quantum’s Foundry King

Last century’s three-letter-acronym tech titan wants to be a little more like this century’s four-letter-acronym tech titan. It’ll take a quantum leap, and billions of dollars.

The federal government officially handed over the first billion-dollar check to IBM subsidiary Anderon last week to help the legacy tech player build the first pure-play quantum wafer foundry in the US. IBM has pledged an additional $1 billion to get the upstate New York facility up and running, in the hopes it can become a TSMC-style leading foundry for the quantum age, restoring Big Blue to the top of tech’s pecking order.

Bit by Qubit

Led by IBM’s semiconductor chief Mukesh Khare, Anderon’s foundry will produce superconducting qubit arrays, quantum input/output signaling, and readout signal chain components. We don’t quite know what that means either (extremely capable quantum computers are built on a system that practically bends the laws of physics to its will, after all), but…