US Department of Energy Office of Science issues RFI for a 2028 fault-tolerant quantum computer with concrete logical-qubit and logical-error-rate procurement targets
On 2026-05-15 the US Department of Energy Office of Science posted an RFI (Request for Information) on SAM.gov (workspace identifier 0946665594a64118ad7d20ee94ea1d71) soliciting industry input on the procurement of a fault-tolerant quantum computer targeted for deployment by 2028, with response deadline 2026-06-09. Per the QCR write-up of the RFI text, the near-term capability floor specified is 150-250 logical qubits operating at a logical error rate of 10^-8 per operation, with the ability to execute at least 10^5 'hard' operations (T or Toffoli gates) and a universal instruction set. The long-term goal stated by DOE is 1,000+ logical qubits and O(10^9) hard gates by the early-to-mid 2030s. Target application domains called out: chemistry, materials science, high-energy physics, and plasma physics. Funding mechanisms under exploration: Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) support for schedule compression, Other Transaction Authorities (OTA), and prize challenges. No specific vendor cohort is named in the RFI; the document is industry-information-gathering ahead of a potential procurement.
Score 6 — anchor §8.2 row 6 'Credible benchmark result with industry-wide implications' applied by analogy: a US-government RFI from a Tier-1 science-mission agency (DOE Office of Science) that sets concrete quantitative procurement targets (150-250 logical qubits at 10^-8 logical error rate per operation, 10^5 T/Toffoli depth) and a hard 2028 timeline establishes an industry-wide capability floor against which vendor roadmaps will be compared. Held at 6 rather than 7 because: (a) an RFI is pre-procurement information-gathering, not a contract award or program-stage commitment — below the score-7 'Major partnership with enterprise buyer including named pilot and committed spend' anchor by a clear margin (no named vendor, no named spend, no contract); (b) RFIs do not bind DOE to follow-through procurement — below the score-7-to-8 'standards / mandate / law' band on the policy gradient (guidance < recommendation < standard < mandate < law from the policy scoring note in scoring-rubric.md); (c) only one Tier-1B trade-press pickup (QCR) observed at run time, with The Quantum Insider not yet covering the RFI — falls short of the typical two-trade-press confirmation pattern for policy events. Score 6 reflects the genuine industry-significance of DOE setting a specific FTQC capability anchor (150-250 logical qubits at 10^-8 LER is the most concrete US-government FTQC target articulated to date, comparable in specificity to DARPA QBI Stage B's per-stage technical bars), while the 'close calls round down' principle holds at 6 rather than 7 given the pre-procurement nature. Source confidence medium (single trade-press pickup; primary government source SAM.gov workspace 0946665594a64118ad7d20ee94ea1d71 referenced via QCR but not independently retrieved in this run — SAM.gov pages require JavaScript and were not loadable via standard fetch); interpretation confidence medium (RFI responses through 2026-06-09 will determine whether DOE advances to actual procurement and on what timeline).
Watch for: (a) RFI response deadline 2026-06-09 — vendor responses are not public but the responding-vendor cohort will likely surface via trade-press leaks or vendor-IR commentary in Q2-Q3 2026; (b) a follow-on DOE solicitation (RFP or BAA) translating the RFI into an actual procurement pathway — typical RFI-to-RFP timeline is 6-12 months, placing potential RFP issuance in late 2026 or early 2027; (c) alignment between DOE's stated capability floor (150-250 logical qubits, 10^-8 LER, 10^5 T-depth) and DARPA QBI Stage B/utility-scale targets — the two programs serve different mission needs (DOE Office of Science: domain-application FTQC; DARPA QBI: utility-scale benchmarking) but may converge on overlapping vendor cohorts (IBM, Quantinuum, IonQ, Atom Computing, PsiQuantum, Microsoft-Atom, Microsoft-Photonic, Photonic, Nord Quantique, Alice & Bob, etc.); (d) NRE / OTA / prize-challenge funding-instrument exploration suggests DOE plans to compress procurement timelines relative to standard FAR-based competitive procurement — a meaningful policy signal that DOE is prioritizing schedule over conventional competition; (e) the explicit articulation of plasma-physics applications expands the DOE FTQC use-case set beyond the established quantum-chemistry / materials-science / lattice-gauge-theory domains, suggesting fusion-energy program tie-ins (the DOE Fusion Energy Sciences program operates alongside Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research, which runs the existing quantum-computing user-facility access programs).