IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry

stogot

The article talks about IBM spreading bets to other techniques. Reminds me to ponder again. Has Microsoft retracted their sketchy quantum claims about inventing new states of matter in the past year? https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2025/03/12/microsofts-qu...

madanparas

The real story isn't the $2B. It's that the foundry is standalone, so other quantum hardware companies can use it. Shared infrastructure beats nine separate research cleanrooms.

dvh

Can the chips they plan to make there run Shor?

caminante

This is a pro-IBM piece. I'm surprised it has zero mention of potential advantages of trapped ion despite being superior on stability windows, accuracy, and operating temps. I also appreciate the disclosure about AI generated content, but this article gets too repetitive.

DeathArrow

Two questions: -do the chips help with inference? -can you run Doom on the chips?

ArchieScrivener

A bailout for a company that stopped innovating and instead has been inventing new ways to create middle management and bureaucracy. So much for capitalism.

postalcoder

Seems like tacit acknowledgment that IBM mothership is not the right place for a speculative growth play from both a management and capital perspective. I’m not IBMologist but I do remember how IBM pushed Watson when it was clear that upper management had no idea what Watson actually was. Regardless of the viability of the underlying technology, it’s best to keep such things away from the consultants. Also, article is very difficult to read. Bad typeface, spacing, coherence and prose. I found the press release less strained. https://newsroom.ibm.com/ibm-and-u-s-department-of-commerce-...

mathattack

Interesting. My observation on IBM is their entire business model is: 1 - Audit your customers 2 - Buy back shares 3 - Force early retirements It was easy to see why Watson failed in that environment. The revenue was “We’ll let you out of the $6mm audit bill if you buy $2mm of Watson”. Companies would agree, install better asset management, and never put Watson into production. I couldn’t imagine Quantum Comouting surviving there. Spinning it off the best play.

amelius

First? Europeans are already producing quantum processors at research scale, soon industrial scale. https://quantware.com/news/quantware-raises-178-million

andrewstuart

IBM is such a weird company what even IS IBM these days? For the most part it seems to be rent-a-programmer “consulting”. But then articles like this come up where they seem to still have research capability. They bailed out of pc hardware long ago, do they still do mainframes - maybe mainframes don’t exist any more?

Scubabear68

I am not surprised, but disappointed, to see something like the CHIPS Act be used for something which is still in ultra-super-unbelievably-early-research-phase. Put more candidly, something not currently useful like Quantum computing. Looks like just a handout to IBM.

izanton

I don't really understand how quantum chips work, but it's so interesting and cool (or it's not)

DivingForGold

Bet this got Elon Musk's attention, his dreams about his TerraFab.

_s_a_m_

IBM does not disappoint with their yearly meme posts about AI and Quantum and what not

bluesounddirect

I would like to believe this is a cover story for IBM to make parts for the DoD latest weapon . I would like to imagine its a cover to make parts for some new government super computer. But its IBM its probably nothing even close to that . Its more likely a nice way to get the stock back at $315 and make nothing.

alsetmusic

US's big bet on quantum computing may not be entirely legal[0] 0. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/uss-big-bet-on-q...