Overview
- SandboxAQ and the U.S. Department of Commerce signed a definitive $500 million CHIPS Research and Development agreement on June 17, 2026 to fund discovery of materials and chemicals used in chipmaking.
- The award targets four program areas: PFAS‑free process chemicals to reduce persistent pollution risks in fabs, advanced catalysts for ultra‑pure gas and deposition steps, permanent magnets that avoid heavy rare earths, and battery chemistries that do not depend on constrained foreign sources.
- SandboxAQ will scale its ReAQT simulation platform and Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) to virtually screen millions of candidate materials, using physics‑grounded training data from methods like density functional theory to narrow leads before sending the best candidates to U.S. labs for validation.
- As part of the deal the Commerce Department will take a minority, non‑voting equity stake in SandboxAQ and may receive royalties if discovered formulations are licensed and commercialized by U.S. manufacturing partners.
- The award is framed as a CHIPS Act move to strengthen supply‑chain resilience and national security, and it builds on SandboxAQ’s private funding and technical work with partners such as NVIDIA while still requiring lab proofs and industrial scale‑up to deliver practical, factory‑ready substitutes.