IBM Spins Off the First Pure-Play Quantum Chip Foundry

IBM and the U.S. Department of Commerce announced a Letter of Intent to establish Anderon, America's first pure-play quantum chip foundry, backed by $1 billion in CHIPS Act incentives and $1 billion from IBM. Anderon will operate as a standalone 300mm quantum wafer fabrication facility in Albany, New York, focusing initially on superconducting qubit wafers. This is the largest allocation within a broader $2 billion CHIPS quantum package distributed across nine companies, including GlobalFoundries ($375M) and seven others ($38M–$100M each) pursuing alternative modalities like trapped ion, photonic, and neutral atom. The 300mm approach offers a 30x device output advantage over 200mm alternatives, enabling faster iteration cycles. IBM is also developing four custom ASICs for quantum control infrastructure targeting a 2029 convergence point. The funding structure creates a two-tier quantum ecosystem, concentrating manufacturing-scale capital in superconducting silicon while treating other modalities as venture-scale research bets, potentially shaping which quantum approaches survive the transition to commercial scale.