(September 18, 2025) President Trump and UK Prime Minister Starmer signed the Technology Prosperity Deal, a landmark science and technology agreement that will propel the U.S. – UK special relationship to new heights for the technological age, including in quantum.

Happy World Quantum Day!

(April 3, 2025) DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) has identified a cohort of companies who will characterize their unique concepts for creating a useful, fault-tolerant quantum computer within a decade. QBI, which kicked off in July 2024, aims to determine whether it’s possible to build such a computer much faster than conventional predictions. Specifically, QBI is designed to rigorously verify and validate whether any quantum computing approach can achieve utility-scale operation — meaning its computational value exceeds its cost — by the year 2033.

(January 16, 2025) The U.S. Department of Energy announced $71 million in funding for 25 projects in high energy physics that will use the emerging technologies of quantum information science to answer fundamental questions about the universe. Awards funded under this program will advance theories of gravity and spacetime, develop quantum sensors that can see previously undetectable signals, and build pathfinder experiments to demonstrate increased discovery reach in searches for dark matter and other new particles and phenomena. The projects were selected by competitive peer review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement for Quantum Information Science Enabled Discovery 2.0 (QuantISED 2.0).

(January 15, 2025) The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is announcing that $625 million is available to support National Quantum Information Science Research Centers. These centers, which are multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary teams, will accelerate the transformational advances in basic science and quantum-based novel-technology platforms needed to develop world-leading capabilities in Quantum Information Science (QIS), and in support of the National Quantum Initiative Act. Each center will integrate multiple levels of innovation, blending basic research, engineering, and technology development in a co-design framework. The centers will deliver prototype novel-technology platforms, capabilities, and major scientific breakthroughs that, in the future, can be further developed into a resource or user-facility capability for the entire QIS R&D community.

(December 23, 2024) On January 31, 2025, DARPA will host an in-person Proposers Day at the DARPA Conference Center in Arlington, VA. The Proposers Day is an opportunity to learn more about the anticipated Robust Quantum Sensors (RoQS) program vision, foster collaboration among stakeholders, address questions, and promote teaming arrangements for research and development.

(December 18, 2024) Today, the National Quantum Initiative (NQI) Supplement to the President’s FY 2025 Budget was released. It is the fifth annual report on the NQI Program, as required by the NQI Act, which became Public Law 115-368 in December 2018 to accelerate American leadership in quantum information science (QIS) and technology.

(December 16, 2024) Realizing practical advantages from quantum-scale phenomena has been a long-sought milestone in quantum information science. The U.S. National Science Foundation today announced six pilot projects to bridge scientific gaps between current quantum technological capabilities and those needed to fully harness quantum properties of energy and matter for practical uses. Each pilot project will receive $1 million for phase one of a process to design and eventually implement testbeds for quantum technologies in real-world environments. These projects join five others that were announced in August 2024. These efforts are collectively supported by the NSF National Quantum Virtual Laboratory (NSF NQVL) initiative, an ambitious program to accelerate the development of quantum technologies by providing researchers anywhere in the U.S. with access to specialized resources. NQVL project teams are led by quantum experts spanning academia, industry, national labs and government as well as others with diverse backgrounds.

(November 12, 2024) The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released an initial public draft report on transitioning to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards. This report describes NIST’s expected approach to transitioning from quantum-vulnerable cryptographic algorithms to post-quantum digital signature algorithms and key-establishment schemes. It identifies existing quantum-vulnerable cryptographic standards and the current quantum-resistant standards that will be used in the migration. The report also provides dates for the deprecating and disallowing of several algorithms currently used for digital signatures and key establishment. This report should inform the efforts and timelines of federal agencies, industry, and standards organizations for migrating information technology products, services, and infrastructure to PQC.