Quantum computing is growing—in Chicago!—and PsiQuantum keeps racking up wins

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 vic