In a city not known for bureaucratic efficiency, the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), a 128-acre parcel being developed on the former site of the U.S. Steel plant on the South Side of Chicago, is a remarkable exception. Plans for the sprawling innovation campus—backed by $500 million in state funding—were announced in July 2024. Builders broke ground just over a year later, last September. Today, construction crews are busy digging and building—and one massive silver building is already nearing completion, a 300,000-square-foot (almost 7-acre) warehouse that will house what could be the world’s first utility-scale fault-tolerant computer, belonging to the park’s anchor tenant, the quantum computing startup PsiQuantum.
Since emerging from stealth in 2021, the Palo Alto-based company has racked up an impressive string of wins—progressing through multiple rounds of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) rigorous Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, and last November raising $1 billion in a funding round that valued the company at $7 billion. This May, PsiQuantum was one of nine companies involved in quantum computing to receive funding under the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. It got $100 million, and the government took a minority stake.
But Chicago is where the rubber hits the road. Here, the company aims to build a massive machine that will leverage quantum mechanics to calculate problems too hard for today’s classical computers and simulate the complex dynamics of chemistry, biology, physics, and financial markets in ways never before possible.
With a uniquely scalable technology, a proprietary supply chain, and an ample war chest, PsiQuantum has a good shot at being the first to finish such a computer, which would come with bragging rights and the chance to start on real projects for commercial customers. But with at least a dozen credible competitors also racing to build commercially useful quantum computers, PsiQuantum’s victory—and even the success of their technology—is far from assured.
The stakes are high, says PsiQuantum’s interim CEO, Victor Peng, a semiconductor industry veteran who most recently ran the adaptive and embedded computing group at Advanced Micro Devices. He wasn’t looking for other opportunities when PsiQuantum came calling earlier this year. But with quantum, he saw a chance to participate in what he calls “a massive transformation in human history,” second only to the emergence of artificial intelligence. Quantum, he says, can solve “profound” real-world problems.
For JB Pritzker—the Democratic governor of Illinois, who is running for a third term amid speculation of a presidential run—the stakes could be both technological and political. PsiQuantum, he tells me, represents a chance for the state to win the quantum computing race and claim a technological edge over both Silicon Valley and the formidable Chinese quantum research establishment.
Pritzker, who describes himself as “a competitive sort,” recalls the tech talent exodus that occurred in the early 1990s, when the Netscape founders Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed the Mosaic web browser while students at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and then—like the cofounders of YouTube and several members of the “PayPal Mafia” who were also alumni—”got up and went to Silicon Valley.”
“They didn’t come to Chicago or stay in the state,” Pritzker says. “And the state did nothing really to put a ring around it, to make sure that there was a reason why an entrepreneur and scientist and technologist would stay.”
This time, with PsiQuantum as the linchpin for his state’s quantum efforts, he’s planning for a different future.
In this Fast Company subscriber exclusive, you’ll learn:
- what sets PsiQuantum apart from its rivals also seeking to build the first commercial quantum computer.
- how PsiQuantum is working with the resurgent U.S. semiconductor industry, which could yield additional business opportunities
- the types of jobs Governor Pritzker believes will be created by the quantum boom, and
- where quantum development is in relation to AI.
A full-stack approach to Quantum computing
PsiQuantum and its major quantum computing competitors encompass a half dozen or so approaches, starting with the way they construct a qubit, the fundamental unit of quantum information. IBM, Google, Amazon, IQM and others use superconducting qubits; Quantinuum uses trapped ions; and Atom Computing uses so-called neutral atoms. Among major players, only PsiQuantum and Toronto-based Xanadu are focused on photonics—computing with particles of light.
But what most sets PsiQuantum apart from peers is its development approach. There is a widespread view that fault-tolerant quantum computers will need to be very large—containing about a million physical qubits. Most quantum computing companies aim to get to that size by building incrementally larger “model” computers that can run so-called NISQ (noisy intermediate-scale quantum) operations.
PsiQuantum, by contrast, aims to deliver a fault-tolerant system from the start, and has been solely focused on developing the technology and manufacturing capacity needed to build a large system. This clarity of mission appealed to Peng when he was considering joining the company.
Other modalities, he says, may have been quicker to deliver quality qubits and grow the number of qubits in their computers, but now companies are hitting a wall as they try to scale to larger systems. PsiQuantum, Peng says, has the opposite problem: “We have to have almost the entire stack ready to go, all working. Once we have that, we can replicate. It’s very clear how we then scale out, but it takes us longer to get to that first one.”
Though Chicago is the planned site for that first computer, the company is building a prototype Alpha system at a facility in Milpitas, California, to configure and test its technology. When I visited the facility in February, teams of construction workers were still in the process of retrofitting the 127,000-square-foot former home of the chip maker Analog Devices for the quantum era. Through a maze of fresh sheetrock, clear plastic curtains, and surprise dead ends, the parts were coming together.
A cryogenic plant from the Swiss manufacturer Linde—including cold boxes, pumps, and enormous helium tanks—was being assembled to provide high-power cooling for photon sensors. In a clean room, workers were attaching fiber connectors to chips. Several “cabinets”—massive steel boxes, like huge bank safes, that will be linked together to form the company’s quantum supercomputer—had been stuffed with photonics chips and networked together for full-systems testing.
To make its computers, PsiQuantum is collaborating with the semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries to develop silicon chips that are etched not with wires, but with fine channels for funneling light that integrate barium titanite, a ceramic compound, for faster optical switching. Critically, GlobalFoundries has the ability to mass manufacture these chips: PsiQuantum will need hundreds of thousands of them for its first full-scale quantum computer.
Peng says that he’s been focused on ways the company can “can leverage the semiconductor industry” in order to scale even before its first utility-scale computer is built. “Because we’re choosing photonics, we can leverage fiber optics and communication infrastructure that’s been out there,” he says.
The company’s collaboration with GlobalFoundries on state-of-the-art optical chips also gives PsiQuantum an edge that extends beyond quantum. As traditional data centers move away from copper to optical components, PsiQuantum’s intellectual property in this area is something that it can monetize. “Stay tuned,” Peng says.
Though PsiQuantum has previously said it would have a useful quantum computer ready as soon as 2027, the company now says it will only begin moving its hardware into the Chicago facility next year, suggesting a longer timeline. The company is also building a quantum computing facility of a similar size in Brisbane, Australia, which just broke ground.
Peng urges patience. “There is a lot of focus on when we are going to have that first utility-scale machine,” he says. “That’s going to be an amazing milestone, and hopefully we will be the first. But it’s the end of the beginning. We’re very much focused on our road map as a whole, not just the first machine.” Peng stresses that the computer coming to Chicago will be a first-generation machine, and he anticipates building future generations, as well as upgrading systems between generations by swapping in higher-performing components that it develops or sources.
Peng is also looking ahead to the day when practical applications bring home quantum’s potential for the broader public. “The industry now is the way AI was maybe 15 years ago, when ImageNet woke people up to neural networks,” says Peng. “[But] I think there are fewer people that understand quantum today.”
To fix that, the company has a sizable team working with strategic collaborators—including Abbvie, Lockheed Martin, and Airbus—to develop quantum algorithms now for a machine that’s not here yet. “This is an emerging market,” Peng says. “What really matters is to get the world ready for this kind of computing, because it’s really powerful and it would be a really unfortunate opportunity to miss for our customers, and for us.”
Public-private partnerships, like the IQMP in Chicago, are critical to realizing this road map. And in Governor Pritzker, the company has a powerful ally.
Pritzker’s Big tech Bet
“Think Big” was the slogan for JB Pritzker’s first campaign for Illinois governor, in 2018. His big bet on quantum is part of that. Pritzker views quantum computing as an area where Illinois has what he calls “a right to win.”
He points to resources like the Argonne National Laboratory and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, both sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, and world-leading research at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Chicago. A recent report by the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition and partner organizations found that schools in the state awarded more than 33,000 “quantum-relevant” degrees and certificates in 2024.
Pritzker doesn’t want to lose these graduates when they look for jobs or start companies of their own. With the IQMP, he aims to create an ecosystem—centered on quantum and adjacent technologies—that harnesses homegrown innovation to fuel growth close to home.
When PsiQuantum first met with him, in its search for a location to build its first U.S.-based utility scale computer, Pritzker was intrigued. “I did a lot of diligence,” he says. Before becoming governor, he founded New World Ventures, a venture capital firm, and Pritzker Group, a private equity firm. “They’d raised a lot of money, so I knew they weren’t going to go out of business soon. They were leaders in the industry, and they had credible investors.” And apart from their technology, Pritzker saw that the leadership team, including the cofounders Pete Shadbolt and Jeremy O’Brien, then CEO, were aligned with his vision of creating a hub for quantum innovation.
“I wanted to win,” Pritzker says. “Thinking big around quantum, I thought we could win them [PsiQuantum], and they could be the first of a number of companies that might move collectively to share space and be near each other, because that’s how you build an ecosystem. And they understand that, too.”
It’s worth noting that the IQMP has an encouraging precedent in the Stanford Industrial Park (now known as Stanford Research Park), a partnership between the school and the city of Palo Alto that opened in 1951 and kickstarted modern Silicon Valley.
During his first term as governor, Pritzker had budgeted $200 million to support the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), an “intellectual hub” launched in 2017 that works to advance quantum research, build the quantum workforce, and accelerate the quantum economy. Based at the University of Chicago, the CQE includes more than 40 corporate, international, nonprofit, and regional partners. Its member institutions have received more than a billion dollars in corporate and government investment to date, including $280 million in federal funding through the National Quantum Initiative Act of 2018.
The $500 million state budget for building the IQMP, which includes $200 million for a cryogenic plant to support PsiQuantum and other users, is a big step up. Already, it’s acting as a magnet. The park has six publicly committed tenants—IBM, Pasqal, Diraq, Quantum Machines, Infleqtion, and PsiQuantum—most of which already have a presence at an “on-ramp” location at the University of Chicago Science Incubator at Hyde Park Lab. Bluefors, a global leader in cryogenic cooling systems for quantum technology, opened its second Chicago-based lab facility at the incubator late last year.
The IQMP will also be home to DARPA’s Quantum Proving Ground program, which will test quantum computing prototypes, and the National Quantum Algorithm Center, a partnership between the state, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and IBM.
In April, IBM announced plans to create 750 jobs in quantum technologies, AI, cybersecurity, and data science tied to its IQMP presence, and is partnering with City Colleges of Chicago on apprenticeship programs. And a program called Quantum Saturdays is connecting high school students in the economically struggling South Side to emerging technology opportunities in both AI and quantum.
“Great jobs are being created as a result of this,” says Pritzker. “Some of them are at the top of the stack: the quantum scientists and the people running the AI and quantum companies. But we [also] need quantum software developers. We need cryogenic systems engineers. We need fabrication technicians. And we need business development and technical marketing people who can not only understand quantum but also sell it.”
At a time when tech workers—and many others—are concerned about AI-related job losses and the growing inequality created by the AI boom, Pritzker sees an entirely different problem with quantum. He needs to raise awareness. “We have to make sure that we’re steering people into careers that will fit into the new AI and quantum industries, and letting them know what those careers look like, because it’s so new,” he says.
While PsiQuantum remains a huge part of the plan, it is now one part of many. Whether it succeeds or fails in its grand ambitions, it has already played a big part in catalyzing a whole ecosystem that now has its own momentum.
“There’s going to be bumps in the road,” says Peng. “This is state-of-the-art stuff. But so far, we’ve seen great partnership [in Illinois] and I think it bodes very well for the success of them building that hub, that ecosystem of technology and economic development. It’s a lot of capital that they are helping with through incentives and breaks and other things in building infrastructure. We’re putting in ours, of course—and we’re a startup, so capital is precious. But I think it just goes to how committed both the parties are.”
