Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
The startup behind Chicago’s more than $1 billion quantum computing deal said operations are expected to start in three years, a win for Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who backed the investment and is widely seen as a potential presidential candidate. PsiQuantum Corp. will start construction at the state’s new quantum and microelectronics park in the South Side of Chicago later this year, Chief Executive Officer Jeremy O’Brien said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Chicago office. The supercomputer — one of two utility-scale, fault-tolerant machines the company is building globally — is expected to be online in 2028, he said. The announcement, which comes just as Chicago is hosting its first Global Quantum Forum, would put PsiQuantum far ahead of competitors. If successful, it would also be good news for Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune who has tried to position his state as a hub for new technologies ranging from electric vehicles and batteries to quantum computing. Quantum computers — which rely on “qubits” and can store data in multiple forms: ones, zeros or something in between — promise to be exponentially more powerful than their binary counterparts. The technology is expected to sort large amounts of data, and solve complex mathematical problems that would take current machines days, months and even years. “We have a very aggressive plan to bring that site online in 2028,” O’Brien said in the interview. “The thing to understand about quantum computing is that it really enables you to solve problems of huge importance that are otherwise forever impossible to solve, not just impossible to solve today, but forever impossible.”
Full report : PsiQuantum’s $1 Billion Quantum Computer Set to Go Live in 2028.