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.
