CHICAGO, IL — This week, the Chicago Tribune published an op-ed highlighting how Governor JB Pritzker is positioning Illinois as a global leader in quantum innovation. This comes on the heels of Gov. Pritzker’s announcement of another new business, Zero Point Cryogenics, opening its first U.S. location at the Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park (IQMP) — another win for Illinois’ quantum future.
By positioning IQMP at the former U.S. Steel South Works site, Gov. Pritzker is delivering on his promise to bring major investments and thousands of jobs to Chicago’s Southeast Side after three decades of vacancy.
Read below:
Chicago Tribune: Illinois invented the future. This time, the quantum park will help us keep it.
[Rashid Bashir, 7/26/2026]
- 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.
- 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.
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CONTACT: press@jbpritzkercampaign.com