Rigetti and QphoX win 3-year $5.8M AFRL contract for superconducting quantum networking
On 2025-09-18 Rigetti Computing announced a three-year, $5.8 million Air Force Research Laboratory contract, in collaboration with Dutch transducer startup QphoX, to develop systems that entangle superconducting qubits with optical photons via single-photon microwave-to-optical transducers, addressing the microwave-to-optical conversion problem central to networking superconducting quantum computers.
A defense-research award tied to a named technical challenge (microwave-optical transduction) is a meaningful government-counterparty validation of Rigetti's networking roadmap, consistent with prior government-award scoring at this scale.
Pairing Rigetti's superconducting qubits with QphoX's transducers advances a credible path to optically networked superconducting machines and deepens Rigetti's national-security R&D footprint.