Quantum's Industrial Moment

International dynamics are tightening the window for U.S. action. China’s state-driven push to industrialize quantum technologies is increasingly visible in enabling technologies and manufacturing, creating price pressure and scale advantages that threaten domestic and allied suppliers. At the same time, fragmentation among U.S. allies—especially with Europe—risks weakening collective access to critical inputs and markets while fueling China’s rise. Given the geopolitical stakes of quantum leadership, poorly calibrated international policies—such as Europe’s push for technological sovereignty and broad U.S. tariffs—can further restrict access to inputs and revenue at a moment when speed and capital efficiency are critical.

Three enabling-technology areas pose substantial vulnerabilities that risk stalling the development and scale-up of U.S. quantum technologies:

• Photonics and optics: Neutral-atom, trapped-ion, and photonic hardware modalities depend on stable, tightly specified laser and optical systems, yet supply is thin, internationally concentrated, and optimized for laboratory use rather than continuous, fielded operation. This mismatch creates a shared vulnerability across quantum technologies and defense applications that rely on similar precision photonics, such as remote sensing and directed energy.
• Cryogenics: Superconducting and semiconducting-spin modalities depend on extremely low temperatures enabled by dilution refrigerators, with few global providers and reliance on helium-3 gas, an isotope that is scarce, expensive, and tightly regulated. Scalability constraints extend beyond isotope supply. Today’s cryogenic platforms are bulky and energy intensive, and system-level bottlenecks—wiring, interconnects, vibration control, and thermal management—increasingly bound achievable size and reliability. Photonic modalities avoid helium-3 but still require substantial cryogenic infrastructure at scale, reinforcing cryogenics as a gating enabler for large deployments.
• Specialized materials and microfabrication: Quantum hardware relies on ultrahigh-quality materials and tightly controlled fabrication, yet U.S. access to commercial (rather than research-grade) wafer supply and foundries remains limited. Critical dependencies—ranging from thin-film photonic wafers and heterogeneous integration to high-purity superconducting materials and isotopically enriched silicon wafers—often flow through foreign suppliers in China and other countries. Near-term action to anchor quantum-ready manufacturing within U.S. commercial foundries can prevent foreign reliance from becoming entrenched as expertise and capacity consolidate abroad.

Key Recommendations

Reflecting the diversity of U.S. quantum supply chain vulnerabilities, this report recommends a portfolio of actions to boost industrial resilience. We highlight a few of these recommendations below. While federal policy tools are critical, strengthening the U.S. quantum industrial base will also require major contributions from regional ecosystems, private capital, industry, and research institutions, as well as coordination with key international partners.

General Recommendations

Elevate enabling technologies—not just quantum systems—to first-order strategic priorities. Dedicated multiyear research and development (R&D), strategic procurement, and infrastructure programs can seed and scale domestic industrial capacity in laser systems, cryogenics, and new materials and manufacturing processes. Joint programs between enabling-technology providers and quantum system developers—rather than arm’s-length subcontracting—can enable effective codesign and enhance deployable system performance.

Boost demand signal and capture early advantage through strategic procurement and pilot programs. Government demand can attract private investment in quantum systems and their enabling technologies while markets remain small. By prioritizing mission-aligned deployment—such as quantum computing for scientific research and quantum sensing for resilient navigation and timing—agencies can generate near-term value, build operational expertise, and accelerate supplier innovation in areas such as laser systems and cryogenics.

Build shared test and evaluation infrastructure. Facilities at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the national labs can reduce the need for enabling-technology start-ups to invest in costly specialized equipment and provide trusted, independent validation of component performance and reliability. By establishing common specifications and benchmarks, these facilities can accelerate component qualification and integration into deployed systems.

Expand access to commercial-grade material and device manufacturing. National laboratory and university fabrication facilities are essential for early prototyping but lack the capacity, process control, and intellectual property flexibility needed for sustained process refinement and productization. Meanwhile, high-volume commercial foundries are optimized for mature processes, not rapid iteration. Federal policy can incentivize commercial facilities to maintain agile quantum manufacturing R&D lines. Targeted tax credits, low-interest loans, and CHIPS and Science Act–style incentives—conditioned on state and private capital participation—can help bridge the gap between laboratory prototyping and commercial-scale production.

Secure trusted access to critical inputs for near-term progress while building long-term domestic resilience. Strategic engagement with allies and partners—via bilateral or existing multilateral frameworks—can mitigate immediate vulnerabilities where domestic capacity is insufficient, promote American exports, and help align policies to curb anticompetitive practices and dependence on untrusted suppliers. In parallel, sustained domestic investment can position the United States to lead the next generation of quantum supply chains—more efficient, reliable, and manufacturable—capable of supporting durable scale-up and delivering meaningful commercial and national security value.

Specific Recommendations

Advance domestic production of precision laser and optical systems. Launch multiyear advanced R&D programs to develop reliable, scalable, and manufacturable laser and optical systems critical to quantum technologies and defense applications. Agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NIST, and the national laboratories can leverage expertise from suppliers, integrators, and end users to speed the transition from prototypes to production-ready platforms. Targeted low-rate initial production commitments—modeled on some defense technology programs—would strengthen demand signals that accelerate supplier maturation and reduce foreign dependence.³

Build next-generation cryogenic systems for scalable quantum platforms. Launch focused R&D programs to advance novel subkelvin architectures that can support large-scale quantum systems while reducing helium-3 use, energy consumption, and operational complexity. Programs should also tackle complementary scaling challenges in wiring density, vibration, and thermal management to enable a transition from laboratory infrastructure to deployable, data center–compatible platforms. Agencies including DARPA, NIST, and the national laboratories can mobilize cross-disciplinary engineering expertise to accelerate development and technology transition.

Anchor quantum-grade wafer-scale fabrication—including integrated photonics and solid-state qubit platforms—at commercial foundries. The Departments of Commerce and Defense should help establish domestic sources of thin-film photonic materials such as lithium niobate—currently sourced largely from China—and commercial integrated photonics R&D lines, including silicon photonics, relevant to quantum computing, sensing, and defense applications. Additionally, quantum-ready process modules should be established within cutting-edge complementary metal-oxide semiconductor fabrication lines to support superconducting and semiconducting-spin platforms, enabling the wafer-scale quality and uniformity required for utility-scale quantum systems.

Secure and steward critical quantum isotopes and materials. The federal government, through the Department of Energy Isotope Program or similar entities, should stabilize access to quantum inputs that are highly regulated (helium-3) and/or relatively low-volume (e.g., silicon-28 and alkali metals such as rubidium-87 and cesium-133) by providing strategic recovery and recycling, refining and enrichment processes, and dedicated reserves. These measures can mitigate supply shocks and ensure reliable access as quantum deployment scales.

The report elaborates on these priorities and outlines additional complementary recommendations, offering a credible path to convert American quantum innovation into enduring industrial and strategic advantage. Timely action can ensure the United States secures the economic and national security benefits of the coming quantum era.

Introduction

In its 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), the Trump administration calls on U.S. quantum technologies to “drive the world forward,” underscoring their potential to transform security, scientific progress, and economic competitiveness.⁴ The call is timely: After decades of research and development (R&D), quantum technologies are beginning to reach operational use, marking the start of a long-awaited quantum era. U.S. quantum sensors are advancing into field trials and early military deployments, enabling high-precision navigation and timing in GPS-denied environments.⁵ Quantum computing firms are achieving rapid hardware and algorithmic progress toward error-corrected systems, with expectations of early applications in materials science and pharmaceuticals in the next few years.⁶ Together, quantum computing and sensing are projected to comprise a roughly $3 billion global market in 2027, while longer-term forecasts place the combined annual market at $35 billion or more by 2035.⁷

As quantum technologies mature, the next three to five years will be decisive. Whether the United States converts its quantum lead into durable strategic advantage will hinge not only on scientific breakthroughs but on the nation’s capacity to manufacture and deploy quantum systems at scale. That, in turn, requires robust supply chains and an industrial base capable of reliably sourcing and manufacturing specialized materials, components, and subsystems.⁸ As the NSS emphasizes, “Cultivating American industrial strength must become the highest priority of national economic policy.”⁹ For quantum, that means technology leadership can no longer be treated as an R&D activity, but as a major industrialization challenge.

The U.S. quantum industrial base is poorly positioned to sustain leadership. Despite a formidable innovation ecosystem—with the densest concentration of quantum start-ups and established firms of any country, building on world-class university and national laboratory research—thin and globally dispersed supply chains constrain U.S. progress.¹⁰ Many critical inputs, including specialized materials, precision lasers, cryogenic systems, and quantum chips, are sourced from abroad, in some cases from geopolitical adversaries such as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia. Even where domestic suppliers exist, reliance on a small number of firms—sometimes a single source—creates significant fragility. These gaps expose the U.S. quantum ecosystem to supply bottlenecks that slow development and complicate the transition from laboratory advances to large-scale deployment.

Meanwhile, competitors are moving quickly to secure quantum advantage. The PRC’s centralized strategy and sustained public investment have preserved its global lead in quantum communications and brought it to near parity with the United States in quantum computing and sensing. Unlike the United States, the PRC pairs research investment with strong manufacturing capacity, positioning it to scale and deploy quantum systems rapidly. That emphasis is set to intensify under its upcoming 15th Five-Year Plan for 2026–2030, which elevates quantum technology as the top “future industry” within a broader overarching goal to build a “modernized industrial system.”¹¹ In parallel, the European Union is preparing a Quantum Act that prioritizes “Made in Europe” supply chains and industrial capacity as the region seeks to enhance its technological sovereignty and reduce dependence on both China and the United States.¹²

The stakes are high. Countries that successfully combine frontier innovation with manufacturing scale will capture early economic and security advantages, shape global markets, and attract top talent and capital. As the United States has learned from the erosion of its semiconductor manufacturing base, once these reinforcing cycles of investment, capability, and market share take hold, they become extraordinarily difficult and costly to reverse. As the global quantum race accelerates, the United States faces a narrow but pivotal window to strengthen its quantum supply chains before it cedes the economic and security advantages of quantum technologies to foreign competitors.

Defining the Quantum Supply Chain Challenge

The United States enters this period with growing political momentum. Bipartisan and cross-sectoral support for quantum technologies has been building since 2018, when the Trump administration elevated quantum as a national priority and worked with Congress to enact the National Quantum Initiative Act (NQIA). Since then, annual federal quantum R&D investments have increased roughly fivefold to about $1 billion per year. The second Trump administration has reiterated its commitment to advancing America’s quantum edge, identifying supply chain and enabling technologies as one of five priority areas and developing dedicated quantum offices or programs across multiple agencies, including the Departments of Commerce, Energy, and Defense.¹³ Moreover, lawmakers from both parties are preparing to reauthorize the NQIA with a greater focus on applications, commercialization, and supply chains, and regional quantum ecosystems are also expanding across more than 12 states.¹⁴

The United States has the talent, institutions, and momentum to lead in quantum technologies; what it lacks is a coherent strategy to strengthen its quantum supply chains and broader industrial base over the coming years as these technologies mature.

A growing body of analysis has begun to examine vulnerabilities in quantum technology supply chains. Prior work has usefully identified specific chokepoints, developed manufacturing roadmaps to guide scale-up, and proposed data frameworks to track suppliers, components, and materials or to benchmark national quantum industrial strength.¹⁵ However, much of this literature either assumes familiarity with the structural complexity of quantum supply chains across hardware modalities and enabling technologies, focuses on a narrow subset of technologies or inputs, or collapses distinct vulnerabilities into a single category. This ambiguity obscures the breadth and implications of the vulnerabilities affecting the U.S. quantum ecosystem and hinders the development of effective responses.

This report addresses that gap by offering a high-level framework for assessing and addressing quantum supply chain vulnerabilities. Rather than attempting an exhaustive mapping of every input and supplier, the analysis focuses on laying out the core structural dimensions shaping supply chain fragility across quantum technologies. Specifically, the report examines:

• Ecosystem-level challenges to U.S. quantum industrial strength: including the industry’s nascency and fragmentation, insufficient domestic support for enabling technologies, and intensifying international competition
• The layered structure of the quantum technology stack: spanning atomic media and quantum materials and chips, operational environments such as cryogenic and vacuum systems, interface components and control hardware such as laser systems, and higher-level software, error correction, and quantum networks
• Major quantum hardware modalities: including atomic, photonic, and solid-state platforms—which realize and control quantum states in fundamentally different ways and therefore rely on distinct combinations of materials, components, and fabrication processes, exposing them to different supply chain vulnerabilities
• Distinct categories of supply chain vulnerability: including dependence on foreign suppliers, insufficient or fragile domestic capacity, and performance and scalability gaps in enabling technologies, each of which constrains quantum development and scale-up in different ways and calls for different policy responses

By examining these dimensions together, the report provides policy stakeholders with a structured diagnostic lens to probe where risks sit within the quantum ecosystem, which technologies and modalities they affect, and what the nature of the underlying vulnerability is. This high-level framing helps orient and interpret more granular analyses and tracking efforts, enabling clearer identification of priority gaps and the development of more effective, tailored responses.

The final chapter applies this framework to highlight key supply chain vulnerabilities and outlines a portfolio of actions to strengthen the industrial foundations of U.S. quantum leadership. These include targeted R&D investments and shared testing and manufacturing infrastructure, strategic procurement mechanisms to boost demand signals, and selective trade and coordination tools. While the report centers around federal policy tools, effectively addressing U.S. quantum supply chain vulnerabilities will also require major engagement from regional ecosystems, private capital, industry, and research organizations.

This report moves from context to structure to strategy, clarifying the nature of quantum supply chain vulnerabilities and how the United States can build a more resilient quantum industrial base. Over the next few years, building the capacity to supply the materials, components, and infrastructure required for deployment will be essential to securing America’s quantum edge—and the substantial economic and security advantages it confers.