The technology at the heart of Chicago’s proposed quantum campus is so new and complex that experts still aren’t certain how it will work in practice.
But that uncertainty hasn’t stopped millions of dollars in public and private investment from pouring into the 128-acre Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, which stakeholders are hoping will serve as a critical economic driver in the state and city for years to come.
Bisnow/created with assistance from OpenAI’s DALL-E
Illinois’ quantum campus could put it at the center of global innovation.
To reach the scale that leaders envision, the ambitious plan will require a sizable amount of collaboration from different parties — and a lot of development, panelists said at Bisnow’s Chicago Life Sciences, Quantum Computing and Biotech event last week.
“What we’re doing is at a scale that doesn’t exist in the U.S.,” Preeti Chalsani, chief quantum officer at Intersect Illinois, said at the event, held on the campus of the Illinois Science + Technology Park in Skokie.
“There’s a whole lot of development work that needs to be done to build this and then to connect it to the pieces of equipment inside the building. That needs to be developed as well. There’s lots of opportunities here, but certainly lots of opportunities for bumps in the road.”
The state signaled its seriousness about the growth of the industry when it lured PsiQuantum to the former U.S. Steel South Works site with a package that included $200M to the company in grants, plus workforce development assistance, a low-interest loan and other incentives in exchange for a minimum company investment of $1B.
Courtesy of Torque/Eric Masi
Clayco’s Michael Fassnacht, Intersect Illinois’ Preeti Chalsani and PsiQuantum’s Aaron Fluitt.
When PsiQuantum started its site selection process, it received about 20 different applications from locales across the country, said Aaron Fluitt, senior director of technology partnerships at PsiQuantum, IQMP’s anchor tenant.
Fluitt said Illinois’ pitch quickly rose to the top for three reasons: the physical infrastructure of the site, the high level of buy-in from local stakeholders, and the abundance of expertise from the area’s professors and students in relevant fields.
“This is an extremely collaborative region for this technology,” Fluitt said. “The institutions work together very well, and that was really evident for PsiQuantum as an opportunity that was hard to pass up to not only move into a new region that has a lot of expertise, but a lot of people that want to work with us and want to work with each other to realize this vision.”
Creating quantum technology that can achieve commercial utility will require many partners to mitigate the difficulties of scaling, Fluitt said. This includes manufacturers to make specific components for quantum computing and highly tailored build-outs.
The city and state have built up strength in areas that naturally lead to quantum technology, like research in material science, chemistry, physics and computer science, Chalsani said.
Illinoisans are behind decades of advancements in these fields that have changed the shape of society. But they haven’t necessarily resulted in an economic windfall for the state, she said.
Courtesy of Torque/Eric Masi
Illinois Medical District’s Cathy Kwiatkowski, Chicago Quantum Exchange’s Kate Timmerman, Siegel Jennings’ Molly Phelan, HDR’s Hans Thummel and Neoscape’s Kate Shepard
Quantum technology represents an opportunity to change that narrative, Chalsani said.
“Let’s get ahead of the wave and make sure that we don’t lose out, that we build the quantum industry here and create impact on all society, but really reap the benefits so we’re known as the place where you go to build quantum technologies,” Chalsani said.
While the quantum technology industry still has a relatively small presence in Chicago, it has grown from two companies in 2020 to 19 in 2025, said Kate Timmerman, CEO of Chicago Quantum Exchange. The level of growth is unlike anywhere else in the country, Timmerman said.
“There’s a huge pathway and pipeline of early-stage quantum technology companies or future companies that are already growing here in the region,” Timmerman said.
Part of the uncertainty surrounding what quantum development will look like is that the technology is so nascent.
Quantum computing is a next-generation computing technology that enables solving problems too advanced for supercomputers that exist now. This could include everything from determining how Amazon should distribute trucks across Chicago to minimize fuel costs to designing drugs with the highest degree of chemical accuracy.
The rapidly evolving science applies the laws of quantum mechanics to solve the most complex problems, and it is still in its infancy. A workable quantum computer doesn’t exist — yet.
Courtesy of Torque/Eric Masi
IBT Group’s Gary Pachucki, Laedral’s Dana Sun, World Business Chicago’s Rebecca Motley, Matter’s Steven Collens, Polsky Center at the University of Chicago’s Shyama Majumdar, JPMorgan Chase’s Jason Gorak and the village of Skokie’s Rodney Tonelli
Illinois faces stiff competition to become the leading pioneer of quantum technology.
Last summer, Colorado beat out the Land of Lincoln for a $40.5M quantum technology grant from the federal government to help turn Colorado into a worldwide hub in the emerging field. Former President Joe Biden’s administration promoted investment in quantum, passing the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, which allocated $174B toward public sector research, including quantum.
On the East Coast, the University of Maryland and College Park-based quantum computing company IonQ is partnering on a project to make a quantum computing system for the Department of Defense.
Although the investment pales in comparison to Illinois’ quantum park, the contract is worth $5.7M for initial work, with the potential for a second phase worth up to $12M.
Illinois’ advantage in the field comes from the strong alignment between all of the stakeholders in the region, but the state will have to continue to push to develop, Fluitt said.
“Our strategic competitors overseas want to win in this space as well,” he said. “There’s going to be a continued drive for us to not sort of stop and coast in this technology but actually to accelerate and start to move faster.”