IBM says Anderon’s first quantum wafers are running through a production-scale, 300-millimeter line in Albany, New York. Anderon, an IBM company, is building a foundry to manufacture components for the quantum industry.
On September 16, 2026, the U.S. Department of Commerce finalized an R&D award of up to $1 billion for Anderon under the CHIPS and Science Act. The award supports semiconductor research and development and the effort to establish a quantum foundry. IBM separately announced an additional $1 billion investment in Anderon.
What Anderon says it will make
IBM’s stated initial manufacturing scope includes arrays of superconducting qubits, quantum input/output (I/O) signaling, and components in the signal chain used to read out qubit states. Anderon is intended to serve customers across the quantum industry, rather than operate solely as an internal IBM manufacturing line.
The foundry also plans to offer process design kits (PDKs), customization, protection for customer intellectual property, and neutral service, including for IBM competitors. PDKs give designers information for adapting chip designs to a manufacturing process. The model is straightforward: customers design their chips, and the foundry fabricates them.
Why repeatable fabrication matters for superconducting qubits
A superconducting qubit depends on carefully made Josephson junctions, tiny structures whose dimensions help determine how the device behaves. Variation in a junction’s area or the thickness of its insulating barrier can affect its critical current and the qubit’s frequency. Changes in frequency can create unwanted overlap between qubits, which may reduce the share of devices that meet their specifications—a measure known as manufacturing yield.
Repeatable patterning, deposition, oxidation, and in-line testing could help control process variation. Those steps describe a possible route to tighter manufacturing control; they are not themselves a measured yield gain.
What the wafer milestone tells us
Wafers running through the line mark manufacturing activity. Yield is a separate measure: it concerns how many fabricated devices meet their specifications. Keeping those milestones distinct matters because Anderon’s initial production scope and the potential value of process controls describe what the foundry is set up to do, not a quantified improvement in chip performance.
IBM’s earlier move to Albany
In 2021, IBM began shifting much of its quantum-wafer research and development from a 200-millimeter lab in Yorktown Heights to Albany’s 300-millimeter line. IBM has said that shift doubled chip-development speed and increased physical complexity tenfold.
