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By Alexandra Kelley,
Staff Correspondent, Nextgov/FCW
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State officials have been positioning New Mexico as a leader in quantum sciences and technologies through private sector help and federal partnerships.
New Mexico announced its first quantum physics-powered telecommunications network, a joint effort from both public and private investment into outfitting the state with a quantum-ready infrastructure.
On Wednesday, quantum telecommunications hardware company Qunnect and the state of New Mexico unveiled ABQ-Net — headquartered in Albuquerque — as a foundational element of the state’s burgeoning quantum ecosystem.
“New Mexico is leading the nation in the development and deployment of cutting-edge quantum technologies, and this investment by Roadrunner Venture Studios and Qunnect is the latest proof of that,” Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., told Nextgov/FCW in a statement. “I’m pleased to welcome the launch of ABQ-Net, New Mexico’s first quantum network, which will help connect the quantum entrepreneurs in Albuquerque who are accelerating our state’s thriving quantum economy and creating high-quality jobs that New Mexicans can build their families around.”
Adam Hammer, who co-founded the venture capital firm Roadrunner Venture Studios that helped fund ABQ-Net, said the network serves as a foundation for the development and testing of other quantum computing and communications applications.
“ABQ-Net will be the proving ground for America’s next generation of quantum entrepreneurs to test, validate, and scale their technologies,” Hammer said. “We are proud to partner with Qunnect to create the Southwest’s first entanglement-based quantum network here in Albuquerque.”
Qunnect’s technologies leverage quantum entanglement, taking advantage of a key feature of quantum mechanics by linking particles together in dependent states. This creates a secure connection between nodes within a given network, and it supports other quantum mechanics-based systems like quantum sensing and quantum computing.
New Mexico is one of the states that has invested heavily in spurring a strong quantum science and tech research and development ecosystem, partnering with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and investing in over $300 million new quantum R&D efforts, as well as commercial ventures, as of September 2025.
Leading technology companies, such as IBM and Google, are vying to lead in the race to bring quantum computing to commercial viability. Quantum networking is an often overlooked infrastructure-based element integral to scaling a quantum computer, with leading scientists noting that its difficulty stretches across multiple disciplines, including materials science and telecommunications.
“The scalability is a huge challenge now, so with the demonstrations, we really need to get out of the physics experiment to a real network,” Rajkumar Kettimuthu, a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, told Nextgov/FCW in September 2024.
At the federal level, the burgeoning quantum tech industry has enjoyed fairly consistent government attention and support regardless of administration. During his first term, President Donald Trump signed the National Quantum Initiative Act into law — with a reauthorization currently pending in Congress — and former President Joe Biden also called for increased budgetary support for the National Science Foundation’s research in emerging technologies, including quantum information sciences.
“ABQ-Net is the first open access user facility in the U.S. providing full-stack quantum networking infrastructure,” said Noel Goddard, CEO of Qunnect, in a statement. “Qunnect has made a name for itself bringing entanglement-based, quantum networking out of the lab and into the real world.”