Quantum money is moving from grants to procurement. For regions, the question is no longer whether to have a strategy, but who will buy from their firms.
For a decade quantum was paid for as science. Grants to universities, research hubs, fellowships, a national centre with a good address. The money was real, and so was the physics. What was missing was a customer.
That is changing, and America is where the change is easiest to see.
DARPA is not buying machines yet. It is doing something more useful: finding out which ones are worth buying. Its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative exists to test whether any approach can reach utility scale, meaning computational value greater than its cost, by 2033. Eleven organisations have advanced to its second stage, and in March DARPA reopened the first stage to new entrants. The programme’s managing director now says it “seems likely that someone will build a utility-scale quantum computer by 2033”. He is careful not to say who.
The states have noticed. Maryland agreed to match DARPA with up to $100m over four years for a test and evaluation hub at the University of Maryland. New Mexico agreed up to $60m, also matched, building on Sandia and Los Alamos. Both contributions depend on results. That is not a grant to a lab. It is a state buying a seat at the table where a buyer decides.
Ohio offers a different kind of buyer, and a more instructive one. In 2023 Cleveland Clinic installed an IBM Quantum System One on its main campus, the first quantum computer in the world dedicated to healthcare research, according to the two organisations. It sits inside a ten-year partnership between the two, aimed at drug discovery and other hard problems in biomedicine.
The customer here is not a ministry. It is a hospital with a chemistry problem. In May, Cleveland Clinic, IBM and Japan’s RIKEN reported simulating protein complexes of up to 12,635 atoms, pairing IBM quantum processors with classical supercomputers. That was roughly 40 times larger than their result six months earlier. The work is still a pre-print, and nobody is yet discovering drugs this way. But in September it was named a finalist for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, which recognises outstanding achievement in high-performance computing.
The more interesting detail for a place is what grew around the machine. Cleveland Clinic runs a programme that gives start-ups twelve months of access to the system and expert guidance, with an investment of up to $250,000 for each company selected. Three firms joined this year’s cohort. A computer on a campus has become a reason for companies to turn up.
Elsewhere governments are acting more like customers too. In March Britain committed up to £2bn to quantum technologies. Half of it, £1bn, is for buying large-scale quantum computers through a procurement programme called ProQure: companies propose prototypes, the government evaluates them and scales the ones that work into national infrastructure by the early 2030s. The government says this makes Britain the first country to commit to an advanced procurement of large-scale quantum computers. The rest, more than £1bn over four years, goes to computing, sensing and navigation, networking, infrastructure and skills.
Australia went further and bought the company’s address. In 2024 the federal and Queensland governments committed about A$940m, in equity and loans, for PsiQuantum to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer and its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Brisbane. In May the company moved the site from Brisbane Airport to Moreton Bay; reports cite planning delays at the airport and infrastructure already in place at the new site.
Europe is still building the supply side. The Commission’s Quantum Europe Strategy, published in July 2025, backs six quantum chip pilot lines and a design facility. The Quantum Act meant to turn that into industry has not yet been proposed, and a senior Commission official has said it may slip into next year.
The Quantum Economic Development Consortium’s 2026 report counts $12.7bn in new government commitments in 2025, up 310 per cent on 2024, and $4.9bn of new venture capital. It puts the market itself at $1.9bn. That is the gap worth reading. Public money is running well ahead of revenue. Governments are paying to create demand before the market can.
Procurement changes the question an economic development organisation should ask. It is no longer whether the place has a quantum strategy. Most do. It is which of its firms could win a procurement, pass an evaluation, or supply a company that does.
Three things follow.
First, the test has moved from the lab to the buyer. A procurement or a benchmarking stage asks whether a system works, what it costs and whether it can be built again. A region whose firms cannot answer those questions will host the research and export the companies.
Second, the adjacent doors are open now. Sensing, navigation and networking sit close to buyers who already exist: defence, transport, infrastructure. Cleveland shows that health belongs on that list. A hospital with a molecule it cannot model is a customer today, not in 2033. So is a defence programme that needs a better sensor.
Third, the places that moved early tied their money to results and to a named buyer. Maryland and New Mexico attached themselves to a federal programme; Cleveland put the machine where the problem is. None of them funded an announcement. They funded the place where decisions about companies will be made, and made sure those decisions would be made on their ground.
A procurement does not locate a company. It picks one. What happens next, the facility, the supply chain, the second customer, goes to the place that can hold it: capital that will back the next stage, sites a buyer will trust, a supplier base that is not starting from nothing. The move in Queensland is a reminder that the site, planning included, matters as much as the cheque. The start-ups in Cleveland are a reminder that access brings firms in; it does not keep them.
That is the work. See where the place stands today. Pick the niche a buyer will recognise. Put the firms in front of the people who procure. Then make sure that when one of them wins, it has reasons to stay.
LibLeo works with economic development organisations on quantum as an industrial problem: the place, and the companies inside it. Outcome-oriented. Jobs, capital, commercial contracts.