[Whirl]

There are annealers that have thousands of qubits (DWave), but they are low coherence and very different from the gate model qubits in use by Rigetti, Google, IBM, which are themselves lower coherence than the ions being used by IonQ and Honeywell.

It’s all very much in the research phase so far. AFAIK there’s no reason to pay for time on any of the available systems (all <100 qubits unless you’re using a DWave annealer) unless you’re doing basic quantum computing research or benchmarking. Folks are working hard to make the small, noisy systems we have now do something useful, but the real moneymaker will be error-corrected and fault tolerant qubits. Those may be available perhaps between 5 and 50 years from now, depending on who you ask.

The Serious Work right now is to build scalable quantum architectures and continue to pursue error correction and fault tolerance. There’s also a shitload of work on optimizing control, devising classical architectures that will mate to the QPU, and so on.

Unfortunately, this announcement is mostly just moving around some of the 1.2 billion earmarked for the National Quantum Initiative back in 2018 or so. Unclear to me if any new money is being added to the pot.