The TSMC of quantum

What made classical chips scale was a divorce: design companies stopped owning factories, and foundries like TSMC made the wafers for everyone. Quantum has never had that. Each maker etches its own qubit chips in a small in-house cleanroom, one boutique line at a time. Anderon — a new standalone company funded with $1 billion of proposed CHIPS Act money matched by $1 billion of IBM's own — is the first attempt to import the foundry model into quantum, running superconducting wafers on the same 300mm tooling the rest of the industry already uses.

Whether any rival will fab at a facility owned by its largest competitor remains to be seen.

The pitch is that the bigger wafers pour out devices many times faster than today's lab-scale lines, which is plausibly the difference between hand-built prototypes and something you order by the batch. The harder question is who buys. IBM calls Anderon a TSMC of quantum, but the analogy quietly breaks: TSMC won precisely by promising it would never compete with its own customers. IBM builds quantum computers. The rivals whose chips a neutral foundry would need are the ones least able to trust it — and the most-cited prospects don't even use the same physics.

There is a second story under the press release. As a condition of the money, the government is taking minority equity stakes in the funded companies — Rigetti disclosed common stock at a 15% discount — the same equity-for-funding model the administration used to take a slice of Intel. Whether quantum scales through a shared factory or not, Washington is now a shareholder in the industry it is trying to build.