IBM said last month it will form a new independent subsidiary called Anderon, a foundry dedicated to producing the silicon wafers that serve as the building blocks for quantum-computing processors. The venture is capitalized with a $1 billion investment from the Trump administration and a matching $1 billion from IBM, the company said.
The foundry will expand IBM’s existing in-house facility in Albany, N.Y., which currently makes wafers for internal research. “Now we have to scale it,” IBM Director of Research Jay Gambetta said in an interview.
Anderon will provide IBM with a new revenue stream by selling wafers to other quantum-computing companies while also ensuring a steady supply for its own quantum programs. The company plans to spend an additional $9 billion over five years to reach the milestone known as fault tolerance—a quantum computer capable and reliable enough for widespread use. That machine, named Starling, is being targeted for 2029.
“If you’re serious about this, it’s about manufacturing at scale,” IBM Vice President of Quantum Adoption Scott Crowder said. “Anderon is one of the pieces, from a supply-chain point of view, that we need to have to not just have the existence proof of one quantum computer, but to be able to build multiple quantum computers.”
Quantum computing, which uses properties of quantum particles to perform calculations out of reach for classical computers, has seen a surge of activity. In addition to its $1 billion Anderon investment, the Trump administration is investing another billion across quantum-computing firms through the Commerce Department, the company said. Google and Microsoft have each claimed quantum-computing breakthroughs within the past year.
On Monday, President Trump signed executive orders setting a 2028 goal for a quantum computer capable of performing scientific research and directing agencies to prepare for the possibility that quantum computers could break standard encryption faster than anticipated. IBM Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna attended the signing ceremony.
The success of artificial intelligence has increased investors’ appetite for once-futuristic technologies, Citibank analyst Fatima Boolani said. The administration’s backing adds another vote of confidence, she said. “Immediately, our reaction was, ‘This puts quantum on the map.’”
Wafers from Anderon are expected to begin production later this year. The company is still finalizing details, including its board and leadership team. The Trump administration will hold an equity stake in the venture but no governance over operations, IBM said.
Anderon will be a subsidiary of IBM, which will serve as an anchor customer and supply talent and intellectual property. The foundry will be walled off from the rest of IBM and plans to raise additional capital and sell wafers to other quantum-computing firms, many of which have already expressed interest, Gambetta said.
For now, Anderon’s client base will be limited to firms using the same quantum-computing modality as IBM—superconducting silicon circuits that act as “qubits,” the quantum equivalent of classical bits. That group includes Google, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum. IBM’s bet on superconducting qubits requires cooling the circuits to near deep-space temperatures and correcting comparatively higher error rates in real time. Gambetta said the trade-off is worth it for speed and scalability. “Our view, and what we’ve always built our program on, is we’re going to build it on a technology that scales.”
Anderon is also designed to solve a prosaic problem: tool downtime. “We’re at a point that the biggest delays in our roadmap are tools going down,” Gambetta said.
Gambetta predicted that one or two quantum-computing providers will emerge as the clear winners. IBM sees itself as having a technical lead, but its broader goal is to build an ecosystem of suppliers and software developers centered on its technology. “The strategy is very simple: Build our quantum computers as fast as possible,” he said. “To build them as fast as possible, we need to build our systems and we need to have a stable supply of wafers. And I want to be the fastest at building this technology.”