“Supply chain is one of the biggest challenges in my mind, and really, the challenge with the quantum supply chain is that quantum is not defined by a single hardware platform,” said Brad Blakestad, director of the National Quantum Coordination Office within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Brad Blakestad: the supply chain problem is many supply chains
Blakestad made that observation in a webinar hosted by Inside Cybersecurity and USTelecom, warning that quantum technologies do not form “one monolithic supply chain” but rather “a bunch of different supply chains that are kind of intertwined in various ways.” He split the ecosystem into distinct categories — computing, sensing and networking — and stressed that even within quantum computing there are “seven different modalities that use completely different components.”
That multiplicity, he argued, complicates any effort to strengthen supply lines because each modality may require different specialized parts, materials and manufacturing processes. The result is a diffuse, interlocking web of suppliers rather than a single, unified procurement channel.
Policy tools: executive orders, government buys and prize challenges
Blakestad’s comments came “a little more than a month after President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on quantum computing,” and he referenced proposed ways to address supply-chain weaknesses that appear in one of those orders. From his perspective in OSTP, straightforward government interventions — buying “widgets from a company that makes them to certain specifications” — and inducements such as prize challenges are immediate levers available to policymakers.
He also highlighted a financing gap: the United States is “on the cusp of quantum exploding from a commercialization perspective, but we’re not quite there yet,” and therefore “there’s not the funding, the revenue coming from large-scale quantum companies at this point to really make the supply chain as robust as you would want.” That shortfall, he said, leaves the government with “too many places that I would want to bolster and not enough funding to do it.”
International supply chain realities: IISS and CNAS assessments
Outside the White House, analysts reach similar conclusions about the global nature of the problem. A policy paper from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, authored by Dongyoun Cho and Maria Shagina, described the quantum supply chain as “inherently international: no single country dominates the supply chain, whether specialised materials, cryogenic equipment, hardware, software, fabrication or algorithms.”
Echoing that international dependence, a March report from the Center for a New American Security identified strengthening the quantum supply chain as pivotal to U.S. capture of the technology’s benefits. CNAS’s report specifically cited gaps in the U.S. supply chain and reliance on foreign suppliers such as China and Russia.
Encryption risk, workforce and the difficulty of benchmarking progress
Supply chain was not Blakestad’s only concern. He singled out “the encryption challenge” as “a real challenge,” underscoring the need to monitor when quantum computers will reach a scale that affects cryptographic systems and to “move as quickly as we can” once that point nears. His prescription focused on domestic strengths: “owning the technologies, by owning the workforce, by making the United States the place that people want to come to be on the cutting edge of this technology.”
He also warned that it is “very, very hard to benchmark” progress in quantum, making it difficult to know “that you’re actually doing what you’re supposed to, what you are intending to do.” That measurement problem complicates decisions about where to invest scarce public funds and how to judge the success of interventions such as targeted purchases or prize competitions.
What this means for policymakers, technologists, and procurement leaders
Policymakers and regulators: With executive orders already in play and limited commercial revenue today, the government may have to prioritize where to inject funds or use procurement authorities to seed supply — but choices will be tradeoffs because “there are too many places” to bolster and “not enough funding.”
Technologists and security teams: The encryption challenge and the difficulty of benchmarking imply a need to track hardware scaling closely and to plan for migration or mitigation strategies as quantum capabilities advance.
Procurement leaders and enterprises: Blakestad pointed to concrete procurement tools — government-specified purchases and prize challenges — as practical ways to stimulate specialized manufacturing and accelerate component availability for disparate quantum modalities.
Taken together, the assessments from the White House office, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and CNAS paint a consistent picture: quantum’s promise is shadowed by a fragmented, international supply chain, limited near-term commercial funding, and technical uncertainties that complicate both defense and industrial strategy. The next steps — which government purchases, which prize mechanics, and how to measure progress across seven different computing modalities — remain choices that officials and industry will have to make under tight fiscal and technical constraints.
