Four Companies Sign On to New Mexico’s Quantum Network
Four quantum companies have signed on as the first users of ABQ-Net, an open-access quantum network in Albuquerque built on entangled particles instead of ordinary signals. Infleqtion, Aliro, Tensora, and Bandelier Technologies will use the shared testbed to develop networking, sensing, timing, and security technology. It’s the latest return the state is claiming on its multi-hundred-million-dollar effort to grow a quantum industry inside its borders.
What ABQ-Net offers quantum companies
According to the July 28 press release, the network was built by Brooklyn-based Qunnect under a contract with Roadrunner Venture Studios, with support from the New Mexico Technology and Innovation Office, and the state frames it as part of a quantum investment it puts at more than $450 million. The pitch to companies is access without capital outlay.
Rather than spend millions laying fiber and building hardware, a company can rent time on a live quantum link and test its ideas there. Two anchor nodes already run, one at Qunnect’s downtown office and one at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, a Department of Energy facility operated by Sandia and Los Alamos, with planned expansion to the Air Force Research Lab and the University of New Mexico.
The selling point is a security model based on physics. An entanglement-based link ties two distant points together so that measuring one disturbs the other, which the companies say gives protections a classical network can’t match. That approach also sidesteps the trusted-node problem that limits older quantum-key setups. Qunnect brings a track record here, having run entanglement networks in Berlin and New York, where its GothamQ link connects several universities and Brookhaven National Laboratory over city fiber.
What the first four companies are building
Read the verbs before the vision. Most of these commitments are early. Infleqtion “plans to use” the network for quantum timing and sensing, and CEO Matt Kinsella’s framing runs to “missile defense to autonomous systems,” which is ambition rather than a result. Tensora is “exploring” quantum-inspired geosensing, and Bandelier will “explore” entanglement and AI for infrastructure resilience. The one company describing something already running is Aliro. As co-founder and CTO Michael Cubeddu said:
“Aliro is demonstrating its AlirOS KeyGen stack using Qunnect’s entanglement distribution systems on the ABQ-Net fiber infrastructure.”
That line is worth drawing, because the release leans on labels like “leading quantum companies” and “the only open-access entanglement-based quantum network in the United States,” which are the companies’ and the state’s own words. The $450 million figure is the state’s, and the promised payoff, a secured power grid and a homegrown workforce, is a goal rather than a delivered outcome.
What’s concrete today is the sign-ups and the fiber, which still puts New Mexico ahead of most states chasing the same industry. The buildout matches other recent commitments to its Roadrunner quantum lab and the grants it hands early-stage quantum startups, part of a networking push that also drives startups building quantum repeaters and jam-proof quantum timing.