The Trump administration has announced more than $6 billion in science initiatives, including a $215 million quantum computing competition and $2.4 billion in industry commitments for artificial intelligence tools and computing resources, as concerns grow over quantum threats to cryptocurrency security.

The initiatives were detailed in a White House fact sheet.

On Thursday, the Department of Energy identified eight scientific applications to guide its Quantum Genesis Q Competition, which offers up to $215 million in planned funding to companies developing fault-tolerant quantum computers. Fault tolerance — a machine's ability to correct the errors that currently limit quantum hardware — is seen in the field as the capability required for quantum computers to run sustained, large-scale calculations.

First announced in September, the program includes milestone-based awards and incentive prizes for companies that demonstrate increasingly powerful quantum systems. Its research priorities span chemistry, materials science, subatomic physics and applied mathematics. With funding tied to milestones, subsequent award decisions under the competition will show which companies clear the program's technical benchmarks.

Advances in fault-tolerant quantum computing could have implications for blockchain-based assets that rely on public-key cryptography. On Sept. 23, three European Union financial watchdogs warned that the development of more powerful quantum computers could undermine the cryptographic systems used to secure blockchains and financial transactions.

For these crypto assets, sufficiently powerful quantum computers could potentially derive private keys from exposed public keys, allowing attackers to steal funds. However, no quantum computer capable of carrying out such attacks currently exists. The DOE program targets the same class of machine — fault-tolerant systems — that the watchdogs' warnings describe, making the competition's milestone structure a point to track as companies demonstrate progress.

The White House also announced that 11 technology companies pledged $2.4 billion in AI tools and compute credits to support research at 15 federal agencies. The commitments include $1 billion from Nvidia, $500 million from AMD, $200 million from OpenAI and $150 million each from Anthropic and Google. Computing power and AI tools have become core inputs for modern scientific research, and the pledges route those resources directly to agencies across the federal government.