DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), launched in July 2024, aims to identify and verify approaches for building fault-tolerant quantum computers that can achieve utility-scale operation, meaning its computational value exceeds its cost by 2033. Eighteen quantum computing companies have entered Stage A of the program, where they will provide detailed technical concepts over six months to show feasibility for creating utility-scale quantum systems. Funding for Stage A will be up to $1 million per company and the questions that a company will need to answer during Stage A include:
- How does your company want to build their quantum computer?
- Why will your company be able to do it?
- How is it going to change the world?
- What are you doing next year that gets you closer to your goal?
A selection of companies participating in Stage A will occur and the successful ones will advance to Stage B for further scrutiny of their research & development plans and define how they will measure progress. Companies that make it through Stage B will progress to Stage C where the will build their hardware and undergo rigorous independent verification and validation by the DARPA team. DARPA has assembled what they call the world’s best, most qualified test and evaluation team who will be using various federal and state test facilities for performing their evaluations. Their stated goal at the end of Stage C is to determine whether a company’s technology works or that it doesn’t.
DARPA has selected a total of 18 companies for Stage A from a diverse set of qubit technologies including superconducting, trapped ion, neutral atom, and photonic qubits. and is publicly announcing 15 of the selected companies. The remaining three are still in contract negotiations and will be named after that has been completed. The companies that have been publicly named including the following:
Some notable companies are not included in the above list, but perhaps they are still in the process of negotiating their contract with DARPA.
QBI is not a competition but a way to assess the commercial quantum landscape and support plausible paths to transformative quantum computing. It builds on and incorporates DARPA’s earlier Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program, now in its final phase with participants PsiQuantum and Microsoft. The goals of the final phase of US2QC are the same as those stated for Stage C of the QBI program, to verify and validate whether a company has developed an industrially useful quantum computer.
For more about this selection for Stage A of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, you can access a press release issued by DARPA here. and view a short video from the program manager here. Most of the companies selected have issued their own press release about their selection. You can view press releases from Alice & Bob here, Atlantic Quantum here, Atom Computing here, Diraq here, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) here, IonQ here, Nord Quantique here, Oxford Ionics here, Photonic Inc. here, Quantinuum here, Rigetti Computing here, Silicon Quantum Computing here, Xanadu here, Qolab (partner to HPE) here and Riverlane (partners to Rigetti, Diraq, and Atlantic Quantum) here.
April 3, 2025
