Nick Holonyak Jr. invented the world’s first practical visible-light LED in Syracuse, New York, in 1962. The son of an Illinois coal miner, he earned three degrees at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and returned there as a professor. His invention now lights the world, and it created a global market worth more than $100 billion. Yet, almost none of that manufacturing happens in Illinois.

Three decades later,  U. of I. undergraduate Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina wrote Mosaic — the first widely used graphical web browser — while working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana. Andreessen then left for Mountain View, California, and helped start Netscape. Four years after that, Max Levchin, also a U. of I. graduate, followed him west and co-founded PayPal with Luke Nosek, who was also a fellow Illini. The co-founders of YouTube Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Bob Miner, and Tesla’s Martin Eberhard all attended U. of I. They took their talent, their ideas and the wealth they created somewhere else.

The pattern is unmistakable. For 60 years, Illinois has been extraordinary at producing the people and inventions that have built the modern technology economy, but we’ve been considerably less good at keeping them. The browser and online payments went to Mountain View. Electric cars went to Palo Alto, California. Cloud infrastructure went to San Francisco. Each time, the value was created here and captured somewhere else.

The Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park, or IQMP, is proof that we are done letting that happen.

What Illinois had lacked wasn’t talent or invention. It was the connective tissue: the venture capital networks, founder communities and commercialization pathways that turn a brilliant graduate student with an idea into a company that stays. Silicon Valley built that infrastructure deliberately, and our state couldn’t create an ecosystem to match it.

That changed when Gov. JB Pritzker made quantum a priority, envisioning a future in which Illinois is the global leader in an emerging technology with the potential to change our world. With the support of legislative leaders in the General Assembly, he then committed state resources, convened partners and put his muscle behind making that vision a reality.

He secured funding for the facilities for Chicago Quantum Exchange, a consortium now anchored by the University of Chicago, U. of I., Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin Madison and Purdue University. It is the scientific and commercial backbone Illinois never had: a single front door connecting research universities, national labs and industry partners into a coherent ecosystem.

And now, the IQMP is poised to permanently change Illinois’ story.

Rising on the 128-acre former U.S. Steel South Works site on Chicago’s South Side, the IQMP is a first-of-its-kind campus dedicated to quantum technology scale-up and commercialization. It’s purpose-built to anchor an entire quantum technology economy — not just research, but hardware, algorithms and the supply chain to manufacture it all. 

Anchor tenant PsiQuantum broke ground on its facilities in September, where it hopes to build the country’s first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer. IBM is also advancing its next-generation quantum computer, IBM Quantum System Two, which the company plans to deploy in Chicago in the coming year. And it recently announced it will bring its FutureNow Chicago innovation center to the IQMP campus, creating 750 new jobs.

Other tenants include Diraq, Infleqtion, Pasqal, Quantum Machines and Zero Point Cryogenics — a strong signal that the eyes of the quantum world are turning to the shores of Lake Michigan. The IQMP and its partners are harnessing this momentum across our higher education and workforce development sectors to ensure that jobs in the quantum workforce of tomorrow will be within reach of the very communities that exist alongside it.

Through the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute — a 10-year, $200 million partnership now expanding to Chicago — the Grainger College of Engineering at U. of I. and NCSA scientists are integrating IBM computers with NCSA’s systems to accelerate breakthroughs in quantum-centric computing. It is the same college that trained Holonyak, Andreessen, Eberhard, Levchin and Chen. This time, its research infrastructure is anchored to a campus designed to keep what it builds.

Our state is perfectly positioned to become the global destination for quantum because the strategy isn’t generic — it’s specifically tailored to Illinois. The quantum algorithms being developed at the IQMP’s National Quantum Algorithm Center will help solve complex problems faced by companies that have long called Illinois home. Companies such as AbbVie will look for molecular simulation for drug discovery, and UL Research Institutes and BP will look for clean energy development.

The lakefront where Chicago once forged the steel that built America is once again getting ready to build something the country needs. This time, the goal is not just the invention. It is the hardware, the algorithms, the supply chain and the investments — all on the same lakefront, all at once.

All eyes are now on Illinois to lead the way on quantum. As our state’s incredible quantum ecosystem welcomed 1,000 participants to gather in conversation at the recent Global Quantum Forum in Chicago, the question that will define this decade for Illinois isn’t whether quantum will work — the science is already moving faster than skeptics predicted.

It’s whether the founders Illinois trains choose to stay, whether the founders the world produces choose to come and whether the value created here stays.

Rashid Bashir is vice chancellor of strategic Chicago partnerships and dean of the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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