Alice & Bob wins a $3.9M ARPA-E award, with LANL and GE Vernova partners, to apply quantum computing to rare-earth-free magnet discovery
Alice & Bob was awarded $3.9M from the US Department of Energy's ARPA-E Quantum Computing for Computational Chemistry (QC3) program to develop fault-tolerant quantum algorithms for designing rare-earth-free permanent magnets. Collaborators include Los Alamos National Laboratory (developing tensor-network tools) and GE Vernova's Advanced Research accelerator. Target: a 10,000× speed-up vs state-of-the-art classical simulations, enabling realistic materials calculations in roughly one day.
Government-grant selection with named LANL and GE Vernova partners is a notable (score 5) credential for Alice & Bob's cat-qubit fault-tolerance thesis; grant size is modest but the ARPA-E vetting process and industry-partner composition add signal.
If delivered, the 10,000× speedup claim becomes a concrete post-quantum-advantage benchmark for materials science and a candidate reference for the broader US 'critical minerals' policy agenda.