Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is staking the state’s economic future on quantum computing, calling it an area where Illinois has “a right to win.”
Pritzker’s $500M Bet
Pritzker, weighing a third term and a possible presidential run, wants to avoid repeating the 1990s, when University of Illinois alumni who built Netscape and helped found YouTube left for Silicon Valley instead of staying in-state, Pritzker said, according to a report by Fast Company.
“They didn’t come to Chicago or stay in the state,” he said. “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.”
PsiQuantum Anchors The Chicago Hub
The state has committed $500 million to the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), a 128-acre South Side campus that broke ground last September, backing it with resources like Argonne and Fermi national laboratories and research from the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The IQMP’s anchor tenant, Palo Alto-based startup PsiQuantum, is building what Fast Company reports could become the world’s first utility-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer, inside a 65,000-square-foot warehouse the outlet said was nearing completion.
PsiQuantum raised $1 billion last November at a $7 billion valuation and received $100 million under the CHIPS and Science Act, with the government taking a minority stake. The company remains private, with no public ticker, and is partnering with GlobalFoundries Inc. (NASDAQ:GFS) to manufacture specialized photonic chips, rather than the incremental scaling used by rivals like International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM).
The park has six tenants, including IBM.
“Great jobs are being created as a result of this,” Pritzker said, citing demand for quantum software developers, cryogenic systems engineers and fabrication technicians.
Victor Peng, PsiQuantum’s interim CEO, told Fast Company that hardware moves to Chicago next year, calling the first machine “the end of the beginning.”
Momentum in Illinois isn’t limited to quantum. Rivian Automotive (NASDAQ:RIVN) is turning its Normal, Illinois plant into a live deployment site for AI-powered humanoid robots built by its robotics spin-out, Mind Robotics, signaling broader interest in the state’s emerging-tech buildout.
Photo courtesy: Shutterstock
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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