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From Steel to Silicon: Chicago’s South Works Site to Host Largest U.S. Quantum Computing Hub

The $2.2 million project will transform the former industrial site into a cutting-edge quantum computing facility, advancing Chicago’s role in the tech industry.

Q3 2024

Chicago’s South Works site once housed the bustling heart of America’s steel industry, but soon it will be home to the future of computing, as PsiQuantum partners with Illinois to build the nation’s largest quantum computing facility on the shores of Lake Michigan.

The 128-acre Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park campus, anchored by PsiQuantum, will house a quantum computer containing up to 1 million quantum bits, or qubits, within the next decade, officials said. Currently, the largest quantum computers have around 1,000 qubits.

The project, now in the early planning stage, will be the initial phase of a broader 400-acre master plan for the site. New York-based commercial real estate firm Related Group and industrial developer CRG will co-develop IQMP for anchor tenant PsiQuantum, a leader in quantum computing, using a combination of private financing and funds granted by the state. Chicago-based Lamar Johnson Collaborative (LJC) will be the lead designer, with Clayco as the general contractor for the facility.

Landowner U.S. Steel completed an EPA-supervised remediation after the plant closed in 1992. However, several subsequent efforts to redevelop the site at 8080 S. Lakeshore Drive never came to fruition. One of those proposals was an estimated $4 billion mixed-use project announced in 2004, with developer McCaffrey partnering with U.S. Steel. The partnership dissolved in 2016 without building anything.

Also in 2016, an Irish developer terminated its agreement to buy the 440-acre parcel and build about 20,000 new homes due to the unknown cost of remediation.

We’ve seen people waking up to the fact that small quantum systems are not going to be useful. You have to build a big system.
Pete Shadbolt, co-founder, chief scientific officer, PsiQuantum
Tim O’Connell, vice president of marketing for CRG, noted that “significant remediation of the site was conducted under prior ownership in the 1990s. As a result of those efforts, a No Further Remediation notice was issued by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in 1997 and subsequently reconfirmed, indicating the site met the agency’s requirements for both residential and commercial uses,” O’Connell told Area Development.

Last August, the state of Illinois announced a preliminary $2.2 million grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity toward environmental remediation of the South Works property, part of a series of state investments in underutilized properties and former industrial sites that are good candidates for redevelopment. Clayco’s chief growth officer and Chicagoland president, Michael Fassnacht, said the partnership with PsiQuantum represents “a tremendous opportunity for the city of Chicago.” He said it will be a “cornerstone” for advancing the relatively new science of quantum computing.

One of the appealing qualities of the South Works site is its sheer size, officials said, along with its proximity to a quantum computing center at the University of Chicago.

Pete Shadbolt, PsiQuantum’s co-founder and chief scientific officer, told MIT Technology Review, “Just in the last few years, we’ve seen people waking up to the fact that small (quantum computing) systems are not going to be useful.” To correct the errors that inevitably occur in the complex quantum computing process, “you have to build a big system with about a million qubits,” he said.

Quantum computers can perform a wide range of tasks, from drug discovery to cryptography, at unprecedented speeds. A number of companies are working to develop the systems using different methods. Both Google and IBM, for example, make the qubits out of superconducting material. IonQ makes qubits by trapping ions using electromagnetic fields. PsiQuantum is building qubits from photons.

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