Inside the Trump administration’s $2 billion push to build the world’s first useful quantum computer

The White House Quantum Summit brought together dozens of quantum policy officials and industry leaders last month, representing a rare glimmer of bipartisanship as the U.S. hustles to become the first nation to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer. The summit, which convened on July 7 in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the West Wing, lasted over two hours and covered everything from supply chain resilience to how the U.S. can meet the deadline the Trump administration recently laid out for delivering a quantum supercomputer by 2028. While experimental quantum computers already exist-IBM and other tech companies have built them-the world is rushing to build the first quantum computer that’s “industrially useful.” In other words, the race is on to build a quantum computer that solves problems that classical computers struggle to tackle quickly by using quantum mechanics. A computer of that caliber does not exist yet, and 2028 is a tight deadline to build one for industrial use. It’s far more aggressive than the deadline spelled out in the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a program from the Defense Department’s research arm that tracks the quantum computing sector, which has set a 2033 deadline for building out an “industrially useful computer.” “The challenge now is scaling the physics we’ve proven in the lab to industrial scale, building the domestic semiconductor ecosystem this industry will be built on, while making sure government moves as fast as the innovation,” says Gregg Bartlett, chief technology officer at GlobalFoundries, a leading semiconductor manufacturing company. Bartlett, who attended the summit, adds that while the 2028 goal “is very challenging,” that’s also the point. “Even if we don’t fully hit it, the acceleration it forces will move the whole field forward.” Officials from the Departments of Commerce, Defense, and Energy, as well as the National Science Foundation, all convened on a panel that was united on collective goals around quantum computing, summit attendees told Inc.