DOE Puts $215 Million on 100 Logical Qubits

My quarterly-updated book, Quantum from the Ground Up, tracks the hardware race toward fault-tolerant quantum computers. The Department of Energy just put a date on it. On September 17, DOE launched the Quantum Genesis Q Competition with up to $215 million planned. Teams must deploy at least 100 logical qubits running hundreds of millions of fault-tolerant operations on chemistry, materials, physics, and applied mathematics problems. The evaluation is set for September 2028.

I've written prior - a logical qubit combines many physical qubits under error correction so the result survives a long calculation. Chapter 4 of the book walks through how that works. Some chips already carry more than 1,000 physical qubits, and those qubits still make too many errors to finish useful work. Here's the DOE competition breakdown.

Phase I awards up to $1.5 million per team for early milestones. Phase II holds $100 million for teams that reach 100 logical qubits, plus two $50 million bonus pools at 150 and 200. HPCwire reports that each pool splits equally among the teams that qualify, so a team at 200 logical qubits draws from all three.

       Structure of the DOE Quantum Genesis Q Competition. Source: U.S. DOE, HPCwire

Verification sits with the national labs. DOE plans a $45 million testbed to benchmark competitors' claims independently. Vendors submit results, and the labs check them before any pool pays out.

QuEra and Harvard have shown 96 logical qubits on neutral atoms, the figure cited in Chapter 8, so at least one platform sits near the count. The operation depth and outside verification set the higher bar. Microsoft's Majorana roadmap, covered in Chapter 10, targets 2029, a year after DOE's evaluation.

Two caveats. Only $2.5 million of the $215 million comes from FY2026 funds, and Congress controls the rest. And 100 logical qubits sits far below the roughly 1 million physical qubits Gidney estimated in 2025 for breaking RSA-2048, the baseline in Chapter 13. A 100-logical-qubit machine cannot break RSA-2048, so the schedule for moving to post-quantum encryption stays the same.

Applications close October 19. DOE holds an applicant webinar September 25 at 1:00 p.m. ET. This post goes into the next edition (December 2026) of Quantum from the Ground Up, available here.