Illinois hopes to make an even bigger play in quantum
Governor JB Pritzker has proposed a budget to state legislators that includes $500 million to support quantum technologies in the Prairie State.
They are thinking big in Illinois when it comes to quantum technologies.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has proposed a budget to state legislators that includes $500 million to support quantum technologies in the Prairie State. Of that $500 million, $200 million would be spent on a cryogenic facility, another $100 million would be used for the development of a quantum campus, and the final $200 million would be spent on matching funds.
The state already houses Duality, the nation’s first quantum start-up accelerator, and four of the 10 National Quantum Initiative Act research centers. The Duality Accelerator is an international program hosted by the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation with support from the Chicago Quantum Exchange, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Argonne National Laboratory, and P33.
According to a more than one-year-old news release, Duality has supported 11 start-up companies to success in its first two years. One Duality-supported start-up, called Super.tech, was acquired by industry leader ColdQuanta (now Infleqtion). Another, qBraid, finished first place in the 2022 Quantum World Congress start-up pitch competition.
A coalition, led by the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE) at the University of Chicago, is hoping to secure $70 million in federal funding in the second phase of a government program that last year saw the region designated as a U.S. Regional Innovation and Technology Hub for quantum technologies.
The CQE has previously received $280 million in federal funding as part of the 2018 “National Quantum Initiative Act” and a combined $150 million from IBM and Google to the University of Chicago and the University of Tokyo last year for two separate plans to advance quantum computing.
