SOUTH CHICAGO — A massive swath of South Side land that was home to one of the world’s largest steel mills for more than a century will soon be transformed into a multibillion-dollar quantum computing campus, local leaders said this week.
The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, a research and development campus anchored by Silicon Valley tech startup PsiQuantum, is coming to the former U.S. Steel South Works site in South Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson confirmed to Block Club Wednesday.
Project backers chose the Southeast Side site over the former Texaco refinery in Lockport, which was also in the running to host the campus.
“This is transformational,” Johnson said. “It’s clear that my pro-business agenda has certainly attracted corporations from around the globe, and [the quantum campus] is more evidence that the city of Chicago is open for business.”
Spokespeople for Gov. JB Pritzker and PsiQuantum declined to answer Block Club’s questions Wednesday. Pritzker, Johnson, project developers and a host of state, county and city officials gathered to formally announce the project Thursday at Steelworkers Park, which is also on the old South Works site.
“Quantum computers have held theoretical promise for decades, but it’s infrastructure projects like the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park that are required to develop this technology and scale from hype to reality,” PsiQuantum CEO and co-founder Jeremy O’Brien said in a statement Thursday.
Prominent company Related Midwest will lead the overhaul of the site with real estate developer and investment firm CRG. Related is behind other major redevelopments in Chicago such as the 78 and the Silver Shovel site, and still owns the Parkway Gardens housing complex in Woodlawn after trying to sell it in 2021.
Clayco, a Downtown-based firm, will lead construction.
The campus will hopefully be “up and running” by 2027, said Curt Bailey, president of Related Midwest.
Quantum computers, which rely on the physics of subatomic particles, can theoretically solve more complex problems than the world’s most powerful supercomputers — and solve those problems faster, according to the World Economic Forum.
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Project backers say quantum computing will be an asset to Illinois’ “critical industries,”
from agriculture and manufacturing to pharmaceutics, energy and financial services. However, the technology is still largely in its developmental phase.
California-based PsiQuantum plans to build the first “utility-scale, fault-tolerant” quantum computer in the country on the lakefront campus, company officials said.
PsiQuantum aims to build a quantum computer with 1 million “qubits” — the basic unit of quantum computing, like a bit is to traditional computing.
A million-qubit computer is considered the threshold for “quantum error correction,” company officials said — a concept that will be crucial to the industry’s success, given the high error rates of quantum systems. To date, only two companies have ever built quantum processors with more than 1,000 qubits.
PsiQuantum plans to build a cryogenic facility in South Chicago that can maintain temperatures near absolute zero, a requirement for operating quantum computers, Crain’s reported in April.
Officials haven’t announced how many total jobs the campus would bring to the area, but PsiQuantum expects to create at least 150 jobs over five years. That includes careers for people with doctoral degrees in quantum physics, as well as jobs in mechanical, optical and electrical engineering; software development; and technical lab work, company officials said.
Pritzker said Thursday he doesn’t want to “guess” the number of permanent and temporary jobs the campus would create, but added the quantum industry is growing “quite fast” and there’s an opportunity for “thousands of jobs right here” on the campus.
At its peak, South Works employed 20,000 people.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a national security agency under the U.S. Department of Defense, also plans to set up a “quantum proving ground” on the South Side campus.
The feds are interested in exploring whether quantum computing can go “from hype to prototype” and become a useful industrial tool after years as “a primarily scientific endeavor,” agency officials said.
“The future of quantum is here, and it’s in Illinois,” Pritzker said in a statement announcing the “proving ground” last week.
“With the support of our federal partners, Illinois’ quantum campus will generate the sort of competitive research that has driven our most important American innovations, all while injecting billions of dollars into our state’s economy and creating hundreds of local jobs,” Pritzker said.
City officials said the quantum campus is estimated to cost $9 billion, while sources familiar with the project told Crain’s in May the campus could draw $20 billion in private investments over the next decade.
Illinois dedicated $500 million in its 2025 budget to quantum research, including up to $140 million to match the defense department’s investment in the “proving ground.”
The city will spend $5 million from the city’s housing and economic development bond on the project, Johnson said. The mayor said he’s also working with Cook County to secure a Class 8 tax incentive for the developers, which aims to spur industrial and commercial development in areas “experiencing severe economic stagnation.”
The tax incentive would assess the property at 10 percent of market value for 10 years, rather than the typical 25 percent. Including the incentive, Johnson estimates PsiQuantum will pay about $100 million in new property taxes over 30 years, he said.
“Once again, Chicago is on the cutting edge of innovation and transformation,” Johnson said.
The quantum campus is the latest proposal for the South Works brownfield, following failed pitches for a movie studio campus, a 20,000-home neighborhood and the mixed-use Chicago Lakeside development, among other ideas.
“We’re hyper-aware of the starts and stops on the site, and because of that, we understand that this development has to proceed with the utmost sensitivity,” Angela Tovar, the city’s chief sustainability officer, said Wednesday.
“The history of having multiple economic development promises made to community — and for those not to materialize — I know that is very difficult for people.”
‘People Want To Know Specifics’
With few confirmed details about the quantum campus, residents met last week to discuss their ideal outcomes, questions and worries about the project.
A public meeting on the plans was scheduled for last week, but city officials postponed the meeting the day before, according to an email obtained by Block Club. Despite that, dozens of residents still gathered that day for an informal discussion.
Attendees said they hoped the project would create jobs for locals and spur further investment in South Chicago businesses and institutions, while maintaining public access to the neighborhood’s lakefront parks.
Neighbors tempered their hopes with frustration over the postponed meeting, with some saying it reflected a lack of transparency from state and city officials since Crain’s reported on the project in April.
Southeast Side activist Peggy Salazar said she’s “on the fence” about the quantum campus. She urged neighbors to keep an open mind about the project — and about what’s needed to revitalize the local economy after the steel industry’s demise.
The quantum campus offers an opportunity for existing residents to organize and ensure the project benefits them, particularly as the developers look to receive tax breaks and significant public investment, Salazar said.
“I want to find out more about it, and I want to find out, ‘What can we get from it?'” she said during the discussion. “Let [developers and local leaders] know, if you want us to support you, what are you going to give us?”
Neighbors with the Coalition for a South Works CBA have demanded a community benefits agreement around any development on the site. The coalition of Southeast Siders dates back more than a decade, to when the Lakeside development was still being considered.
Johnson didn’t commit this week to signing a community benefits agreement around the project, but he is “happy to have that conversation” with residents, he said.
“I haven’t heard that before,” Pritzker said when asked whether project backers should negotiate such an agreement with neighbors. “I can tell you there’s quite a lot of community benefit that is already being invested in this, as a result of the commitment that’s being made here.”
City officials say they aren’t yet clear on the potential environmental impacts of the project, which are of concern to residents given the site’s proximity to Lake Michigan and location on contaminated industrial land.
Environmental issues will be explored further as leaders and developers hammer out more specifics around the site plan, city officials said.
Project renderings appear to show Steelworkers Park and nearby Park No. 566 — both located on former South Works property — intact alongside the development.
“We do anticipate public spaces will continue to remain public,” Deputy Mayor Kenya Merritt said Wednesday when asked whether the project plans would impact local parks.
Some neighbors also questioned whether it was realistic to expect neighborhood residents to receive high-paying, quantum computing jobs, with only about 20 percent of South Chicagoans holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. That’s compared to a citywide rate of 42 percent.
The city will work with Chicago Public Schools, City Colleges and local universities like the University of Chicago to create a pipeline preparing neighbors to work in the quantum computing industry, officials said.
PsiQuantum will also partner with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Chicago and Northwestern University on research and educational projects around quantum, company officials said.
Jobs in construction, maintenance and other fields with lower barriers to entry will also be created through the project, Johnson said.
“This is the beauty of this particular industry, because it doesn’t lock you in to only one aspect,” he said. “We’re going to work with our Chicago Public Schools, our community colleges, [to give residents] the tools that they need to partake in this growing sector.”
Local leaders shouldn’t have postponed last week’s planned meeting — or they should have at least turned out to the replacement gathering to answer the community’s questions, some neighbors said.
City officials blamed the uncertainty over whether Chicago would be selected to host the quantum campus for the lack of public meetings over the past few months.
“Certainly, people want to know specifics, and at that time, because we were in competition [with Lockport], there was a certain level of specificity we just didn’t have,” Merritt told Block Club.
“We have had some conversations — not in an open forum, but some significant conversations with key stakeholders. What we’re hearing is optimism about the project.”
Aside from Alds. Greg Mitchell (7th) and Peter Chico (10th), in whose wards the former South Works resides, Merritt did not name specific groups or residents who indicated their support to city officials. Tovar directed a question on community engagement efforts prior to this week to the governor’s office.
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