Rigetti secures $100m US government deal for quantum R&D
Rigetti Computing has signed a definitive agreement with the US Department of Commerce for a $100 million award to advance superconducting quantum computing research and development. The Berkeley-based company, listed on Nasdaq as RGTI, will pursue the work through its subsidiary Rigetti & Co, LLC, with funding allocated under the CHIPS Act's Research and Development Office Broad Agency Announcement.
The agreement covers three discrete engineering projects targeting known bottlenecks in scaling superconducting systems: miniaturising readout electronics into an integrated package, expanding cryogenic capacity through a new cryostat architecture, and developing fabrication capabilities for high-connectivity chip designs. As a condition of the award, the Department of Commerce will receive a minority, non-controlling equity stake in Rigetti, a structure designed to improve the return to US taxpayers from the investment.
What the funding targets
Chief executive Subodh Kulkarni framed the award in national and industrial terms. "Solving crucial challenges in scaling gives us the opportunity to transform the industry by putting large-scale quantum computers in the hands of America's quantum computing researchers faster," he said. "Shortening the time to build quantum systems at scale and reducing their cost will also allow for broader adoption, which will strengthen our domestic quantum computing ecosystem."
The three R&D workstreams reflect genuine engineering constraints that have limited progress across the superconducting qubit field, not just at Rigetti. Cryogenic capacity is a particular bottleneck: dilution refrigerators capable of maintaining the millikelvin temperatures needed for superconducting qubits are expensive, physically large, and limited in the number of qubits they can support. A new cryostat architecture that expands this capacity by multiple orders of magnitude, if successful, would have broad significance for the sector.
Rigetti currently ships on-premises systems ranging from 9 to 108 qubits, with its Cepheus line based on a proprietary chiplet tiling approach. The company also operates its Quantum Cloud Services platform, providing remote access for enterprise, government and research clients. It claims gate speeds of 50 to 70 nanoseconds for its superconducting systems.
Market and policy context
The CHIPS Act, signed into law in 2022, is best known for funding domestic semiconductor fabrication, but its R&D provisions extend to adjacent hardware technologies including quantum computing. This award signals that the US government regards superconducting quantum systems as strategically important infrastructure, not purely a long-horizon research project.
Rigetti's competitors in the superconducting qubit segment include IBM and Google, both of which operate substantially larger internal programmes. IBM's roadmap has targeted qubit counts in the thousands and has released detailed error-correction research; Google achieved what it described as a quantum error-correction milestone in late 2023 with its Willow chip. Rigetti differentiates on its vertically integrated manufacturing capability at Fab-1 and on its multi-chip chiplet approach, which it says offers a clearer scaling path than monolithic designs.
The equity-stake structure used here echoes similar provisions in CHIPS Act semiconductor grants, where recipients such as TSMC and Intel agreed to profit-sharing or equity mechanisms. For a pre-profit company of Rigetti's size, equity dilution will be a watchpoint for existing shareholders, as flagged in the company's forward-looking statement disclosures.
Post-quantum cryptography timelines add further urgency to the broader policy context. NIST finalised its first set of post-quantum encryption standards in 2024, and federal agencies face a 2030 migration deadline. Governments are therefore simultaneously funding quantum-computing acceleration and quantum-resistant cryptography, reflecting uncertainty about when cryptographically relevant quantum systems might emerge. Rigetti's roadmap towards utility-scale computing, supported by this award, will be benchmarked against that timeline by both investors and policymakers.