On November 6, 2025, DARPA announced it had selected 11 companies to advance to Stage B of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), the agency’s flagship program to determine whether an industrially useful quantum computer can be built by 2033. The initiative defines utility-scale as a quantum computer whose computational value exceeds its cost.
The 11 companies selected for Stage B are: Atom Computing, Diraq, IBM, IonQ, Nord Quantique, Photonic Inc., Quantinuum, Quantum Motion, QuEra Computing, Silicon Quantum Computing, and Xanadu. They were selected from a larger pool of 15 companies that participated in Stage A, a six-month conceptual review phase.
During Stage B, DARPA’s test and evaluation team will review each company’s research and development plans, risk-mitigation strategies, and prototype roadmaps to determine whether their approaches can meet near-term milestones and the ultimate 2033 objective. Companies successful in Stage B will progress to Stage C, where independent verification and validation teams will test actual hardware against benchmarks.
Separately, Microsoft and PsiQuantum had already advanced to the final phase of the Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program, a precursor to QBI that shares the same Stage C technical goals. DARPA stated that the initiative is not a competition to select a single winner but rather an evaluation of each company’s approach on its own merits.