This analysis was prepared for the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium (BASIC) and the Bay Area Council Economic Institute by Yelda Bartlett, a graduate student at the Goldman School of Public Policy, at the University of California at Berkeley, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Master of Public Affairs degree. This assessment draws on three streams of evidence: a dataset of the regional ecosystem, stakeholder interviews, and a scan of comparator regions.1 The analysis is anchored to Assembly Bill 940 (signed October 2025), which requires the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development to publish a statewide quantum sector strategy by July 2026.
The Bay Area’s Quantum Ecosystem
Building and Sustaining Global Leadership
Executive Summary
The Bay Area is home to the deepest concentration of quantum research, hardware talent, and venture capital in the United States. Its asset base includes 74 entities across the region, spanning research, hardware, software, sensing, end users, infrastructure, and capital. Anchors include federal research labs (Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia-California, NASA Ames Research Center, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis deepen the base through computing, nanotechnology, materials, life science, and workforce programs. Shared infrastructure includes the Molecular Foundry, Advanced Light Source, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT) and QUANT-NET at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab; Stanford’s Nanofabrication facility, and SLAC’s Superconducting Quantum Foundry. Commercial development is led by companies such as Rigetti, Google, IBM, PsiQuantum, and NVIDIA. Another layer of firms provides enabling technologies such as cryogenics, fabrication, control electronics, and software.
The Bay Area does not, however, yet have a regional organization or framework that will allow it to convert those assets into a durable, job-creating quantum economy. This assessment, prepared for the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium (BASIC) maps the regional quantum ecosystem, traces its critical dependencies, and identifies the coordination opportunities that can inform California’s statewide quantum sector strategy under Assembly Bill 940.
The analysis draws on three streams of evidence: a dataset of the regional ecosystem, stakeholder interviews (spanning national laboratories, full-stack quantum companies, and a quantum startup), and a scan of comparator regions. Four findings emerge. On ecosystem resilience, several critical inputs depend on a small number of overseas suppliers, and no regional institution is positioned to translate firm-level supplier risk into a shared regional picture. On commercialization throughput, the binding constraint is user activation: the region has the end-user firms that could anchor structured demand for quantum applications but lacks a process to aggregate that demand. On regional competitiveness, the Bay Area’s position is strong, with deep university capacity, technical talent, venture capital, and a long record of federal awards, but the next generation of large, multi-year federal programs will be contested by peer regions that have moved faster to organize their assets. On implementation feasibility, Workforce runs through all four findings as a cross-cutting constraint.
Comparator regions point to a recurring pattern. In Illinois, the Mountain West, Maryland, and New South Wales, a state-level body sets policy and capital direction while a separate regional body coordinates universities, suppliers, anchor firms, and end users. California has the state-level half and not the regional half. What is missing isn’t a new authority but a trusted aggregator: a body able to collect information and demand across competing firms, chartered so that it is neutral, durable, and eligible to hold federal funds. Several institutional forms could serve this purpose, including an existing organization such as the Bay Area Council/Bay Area Council Economic Institute and their science affiliate the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium (BASIC), a new coalition on the model of Colorado’s Elevate Quantum, or an existing public institution such as the University of California. Selecting among them is a decision for regional stakeholders and GO-Biz.
The report sets out five recommendations: 1) to charter a Bay Area regional entity that can present the region as an organized coalition to the federal programs now funding quantum; 2) establish a regional supply-chain visibility initiative to surface supplier dependencies that cannot be assessed from outside individual firms; 3) convene a regional end-user demand-aggregation coalition; 4) build shared testbed capacity that gives early-stage quantum companies efficient access to fabrication, cryogenic, and testing infrastructure; and 5) activate a sub-PhD workforce pathway, drawing on California funding mechanisms that are already in place. Together, these moves would better position the Bay Area to retain and grow firms, compete for federal awards, and capture the economic value of the quantum assets it has already built.