The Pentagon Official Who Signed Off on D-Waves $100M Quantum Award Helped Take It Public Three Years Ago

The U.S. government awarded D-Wave Quantum $100 million in CHIPS Act funding last week. It cannot confirm whether the Pentagon official who approved that award recused himself — and federal conflict-of-interest law is unambiguous on this point.

Emil Michael, now the Pentagon's chief technology officer, shepherded D-Wave through a blank-check merger in 2022, taking it public while heading the acquisition firm. The Commerce Department's announcement shows Michael signed off on the same company's $100 million award last week. Reuters did not confirm whether he participated in the review or stepped aside. Federal law requires executive branch officials to recuse from decisions affecting their financial interests — the statute does not include a carve-out for transactions that closed years ago. If Michael did not recuse, the award may have violated that requirement. The Pentagon did not respond to a question about whether an ethics review occurred.

D-Wave is one of nine quantum companies receiving a total of $2.013 billion under the CHIPS Act — the largest federal quantum bet since the law passed. The government is taking a minority equity stake in all nine, making taxpayers partial owners before any company has proven it can build a scalable product. The law does not explicitly authorize this structure; Commerce says the stakes are designed to enhance taxpayer returns, but declined to specify governance rights, IP restrictions, or exit terms.

The administration has taken equity positions in other strategic tech firms under CHIPS — Intel, MP Materials — but neither has an Emil Michael attached. D-Wave does. PsiQuantum, another $100 million recipient, has its own set of connections: the company raised $1 billion last year from investors including Nvidia's venture arm and 1789 Capital, a firm backed by Donald Trump Jr. It did not respond to questions about whether any investor was involved in the award process.

IBM's award is the largest at $1 billion, funding a new subsidiary called Anderon that IBM says will be America's first purpose-built quantum chip foundry, operating in New Albany, New York. IBM is contributing $1 billion in cash, intellectual property, and workforce. GlobalFoundries receives $375 million for a multi-technology quantum foundry. The remaining seven companies — Atom Computing, Diraq, D-Wave, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum, and Rigetti — receive awards between $38 million and $100 million each (NIST Press Release).

Sumit Kapur, CEO of Zapata Quantum — which did not receive an award — told EE Times that spreading money across competing hardware approaches is encouraging but insufficient on its own. The risk, he said, is that the U.S. builds world-class quantum factories without the algorithms and use cases to run on them. "If we focus all of our efforts on building these capacities, but we don't end up with the actual applications and use cases that connect these capacities and make them tangible and advance ROI at the enterprise level, then we're not making real progress."

Kapur's concern is legitimate. It's also a separate question from whether the D-Wave award should have been awarded at all.