What DOE’s Quantum Committee Report Says About the Rest of the Stack

On June 22, 2026, the President signed two executive orders that reframed quantum computing as a matter of federal industrial policy rather than a research curiosity.¹ 

• The first order focused on security, requiring federal agencies and contractors to upgrade encryption before quantum computers arrive.
• The second focused on accelerating research, commercialization, and workforce development.

Buried in Section 4 of the innovation order was a specific instruction.

The Secretary of Energy, in coordination with the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, had 90 days to identify the technical specifications for a national quantum computer.

The SCAC Quantum Committee’s September 2026 report is that 90-day marker, and it is closely aligned with the Quantum Genesis Initiative the orders set in motion.² It’s worth reading not as a press release but as a roadmap with dates, milestones, and an implicit list of who gets invited to build it.

We were curious how this report could be connected back to the WisdomTree Quantum Computing Fund (WQTM).³ A roadmap like this could be thought of as a filter. It can tell you which companies might sit more or less directly in the government’s crosshairs over the next 24 months, which might sit downstream at the 2028–2030 horizon, and which may be only tangentially related to what DOE is actually funding.

The Three-Phase Structure Is Itself the First Signal

The Committee’s roadmap has three phases.

1. Quantum Grand Challenges (2026–2028, milestone-driven competitions across hardware, algorithms, and applications)
2. A DOE Quantum Computing User Facility if the challenges justify it (2028 onward)
3. Long-term integration of quantum into the broader DOE scientific enterprise (2030s)

Phase 1 is explicitly about de-risking and comparing technologies, not about picking a production winner. Phase 2 is contingent, and the report is careful to say a user facility should be built only “if warranted” by what Phase 1 shows. That’s a longer and more conditional runway than some of the more triumphalist quantum-adjacent narratives in the market this year would suggest, and it argues for exactly the kind of technology-agnostic exposure a fund provides rather than a bet concentrated in one modality.

No Declared Winner Among Modalities, Which Matches WQTM’s Exposure

The most emphatic, repeated finding in the report is that DOE should not converge on a single hardware approach. The Committee writes that a future facility should be“a portfolio of instruments rather than a single winner,” spanning superconducting circuits, trapped ions, neutral atoms, photonics, and spin qubits, with competition adjudicated by common scientific milestones rather than a procurement bet. That is, almost verbatim, the argument for owning such companies as:

• Quantinuum (6.83%) and IonQ (5.80%) within the trapped-ion modality.
• Rigetti (5.67%), D-Wave (5.46%), IQM (2.07%), IBM (5.21%) and Alphabet (2.91%) within the superconducting modality
• Infleqtion (4.78%) and Pasqal (0.48%) within the neutral atom modality.
• Xanadu (3.19%) within the photonic modality

The report’s own stakeholder interviews reinforce this. Interviewed leaders “consistently advised against prematurely selecting a single hardware modality,” citing real uncertainty across every architecture. For a fund built on breadth across different modalities, this section reads less like a new thesis and more like independent confirmation of the existing one.

The Enabling-Technology Stack Gets Its Own Recommendation, and It’s the Least-Discussed Layer

Recommendation 5 calls for broadening investment“across the quantum technology stack,” specifically citing DOE’s strength in cryogenics, materials, microelectronics and large-scale systems engineering. This is the unglamorous plumbing beneath the qubits. This is where a chunk of WQTM’s holdings live.

• The Fabrication Side: GlobalFoundries (3.47%) and applied-materials names, like Applied Materials (0.92%), LAM Research (0.79%) and Soitec (1.17%)
• Suppliers of Cryogenic and Measurement Infrastructure: Oxford Instruments (1.05%), Keysight (1.62%), Hamamatsu Photonics (1.44%) and TDK (0.95%)
• Packaging and Interconnect: Corning (1.32%), FormFactor (1.01%) and Ciena (0.98%)

The report’s technology roadmap tables are explicit about 2026–2027 milestones in exactly these areas, noting such details as control electronics operating an order of magnitude more qubits without fidelity loss, manufacturing yield specs held across consecutive batches, and modular architectures entangled acrossseparately built modules. None of this shows up in headline“quantum stock” narratives, which tend to fixate on qubit counts from the named platform companies, but it’s arguably the more durable, less speculative part of the roadmap, since these firms sell into fabrication and instrumentation demand regardless of which qubit modality ultimately wins.

Integration with High-Performance Computing (HPC) and AI Names the Holdings That Are Hedges, Not Pure-Plays

Finding 3 and Recommendation 4 both stress that DOE’s differentiator is combining quantum with leadership-class HPC and AI infrastructure, not deploying quantum computers in isolation. The report’s language on “hybrid quantum-classical workflows” as the near-term reality (not standalone quantum advantage) is a useful gut-check against any narrative that treats a working qubit as the whole story. Microsoft (3.23%), Amazon (3.32%), Google (2.91%), NVIDIA (3.09%) and Intel (2.23%) are exposed to this theme mostly as classical-compute and AI infrastructure providers who benefit from hybrid workflows becoming standard practice. We do find it interesting that Microsoft has been pursuing topological qubits, Amazon has been pursuing CAT qubits, Google has been pursuingsuperconducting qubits and even Intel is involved with silicon spin qubits, but so farthese efforts could reasonably be described as research rather than as having any immediate revenue potential. These firms have a fundamentally different risk profile than the smaller pure-play names, and it’s worth being clear-eyed that their weight in WQTM could function at least partly as a diversification and stability mechanism, not direct exposure to the roadmap’s qubit milestones. On the other hand, if the space takes off, it may be that usage of quantum computing could manifest as a bolt-on capability to a cloud computing infrastructure subscription, like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.

Networking and Telecom Holdings Map to a Real but Later-Stage Section

The report’s “modularity, networking, and interconnects” material, covering distributed quantum architectures, quantum networking and chip-to-chip photonic links, points toward NTT (1.76%), Nokia (1.62%), Cisco (1.56%), Deutsche Telekom (1.53%), SK Telecom (2.26%) and Fujikura (0.98%). This is legitimate roadmap territory (the cited literature includes a 2026 Nature Photonics paper on a 1-km photonic link between dilution refrigerators⁴), but it sits later in the sequencing than the 2026–2028 Grand Challenges phase, closer to Phase 3’s “integrated quantum future.” We can see it as worth noting as thesis support for WQTM, but not likely a near-term catalyst.

Where the Mapping Gets Thinner, and Where Discipline Matters

A few things an investor should sit with rather than gloss over.

First, the report is unambiguous that Congress and DOE need to appropriate money well beyond current levels for any of this to happen on the stated timeline, and Recommendation 6 says so directly, while the Committee’s own “Areas of Divergence” section flags real disagreement among stakeholders about pace, architecture and how much DOE should host hardware itself versus simply convene others. A roadmap with open funding questions and internally acknowledged technical disagreement is not the same as a demand signal with a committed budget behind it.

Second, DOE’s own customer in the near term is largely itself, meaning national laboratories, the National Quantum Information Science Research Centers and a future user facility, not the broader commercial market these companies eventually need for revenue. The 2028 milestones in the report (things like chemically accurate predictions for a protein-ligand system, a validated fusion-materials prediction and a nuclear-response demonstration) are scientific-utility benchmarks, not commercial deployment or revenue events. It’s easy to read “scientifically relevant demonstration by 2028” as a business milestone for the platform companies; the report itself is careful not to conflate the two, and investors shouldn’t either.

Third, the report names specific commercial names only sparingly, and mostly as examples of a collaboration model.

• IBM and Cleveland Clinic
• QuEra⁵ and Los Alamos
• IBM and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

This is not an endorsement of any company’s roadmap but rather an illustration of what potential collaborations can look like.

The Honest Takeaway

The roadmap validates the fund’s structural thesis, which is diversification across modality and across the stack, rather than a bet on a single architecture. The enabling-technology and fabrication names arguably map onto the government’s stated priorities more directly and more durably than the marquee qubit names, if only because the report’s near-term milestones (2026–2027) are mostly about engineering plumbing, not scientific breakthroughs. The biggest variable the report can’t resolve, sustained Congressional funding at the scale the Committee says is required, sits entirely outside any portfolio’s control. As a checkpoint on strategy, the report says that broad exposure across modality and stack was the right instinct; the next real test is whether the money behind Quantum Genesis actually shows up at the scale this Committee says is necessary.

¹Sources: Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation,Exec. Order No. 14413 (June 22, 2026). The White House; Exec. Order No. 14412, Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks, 91 Fed. Reg. 38483 (June 25, 2026).

²Source for the report described throughout this piece: SCAC Quantum Subcommittee. (2026, September). SCAC quantum committee report: Path to an integrated quantum future. U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science.

³WQTM is designed to track the total return performance of, before fees and expenses, the WisdomTree Classiq Quantum Computing Index. Throughout this piece, if a company name is mentioned, it will be followed by a % in parentheses specifying the exposure within WQTM as of September 18, 2026. Holdings subject to change.

⁴Source: Zhou, Y., Wu, Y., Li, C., Shen, M., Yang, L., Xie, J., & Tang, H. X. (2026). A 1-km photonic link connecting superconducting circuits in two dilution refrigerators. Nature Photonics, 20, 579–585.

⁵As of this writing, QuEra was a private company and as such could not be included within WQTM.