IBM Spins Out Anderon as First Pure-Play 300mm Quantum Foundry, Anchors $2B CHIPS Bet

IBM and the U.S. Commerce Department announced a Letter of Intent to create Anderon, a standalone 300mm quantum wafer fabrication facility in Albany, NY, funded by $1 billion in CHIPS Act incentives matched by $1 billion from IBM plus IP, assets, and staff. Anderon is the centerpiece of a broader $2 billion CHIPS quantum package spread across nine companies, with much smaller equity-style investments going to GlobalFoundries ($375M), D-Wave, Rigetti, Infleqtion, Atom Computing, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum ($100M each), and Diraq ($38M). The government takes minority equity stakes in each recipient, mirroring recent deals with Intel and critical-minerals firms.

The lopsided allocation — 50:1 between Anderon and Diraq — signals a clear policy bet that superconducting silicon is the only quantum modality currently able to exploit production-grade 300mm semiconductor infrastructure. IBM argues the move from 200mm research fabs to a 24/7 automated 300mm line delivers roughly 30x faster device output, an iteration advantage trapped-ion, photonic, and neutral-atom approaches cannot match because they share no tooling lineage with CMOS fabs. Competing modalities get venture-scale capital rather than manufacturing infrastructure, effectively creating a two-tier ecosystem.

Anderon will also fabricate the classical control electronics IBM considers essential to fault-tolerant scaling, including four custom ASICs (decoder, two-qubit gate controller, single-qubit controller, amplifier) targeted to converge around 2029. CEO Arvind Krishna compared quantum’s trajectory to AI silicon a decade ago and projected multi-billion-dollar annual revenue by the mid-2030s. The open question is whether concentrating capital on the most fab-ready approach accelerates U.S. leadership or underweights modalities that may ultimately scale better on physics rather than manufacturing economics.