Editorial: Quantum is not AI, folks, and Chicago is not building a lakefront data center

Chicago Tribune Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune on Sep 22, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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Repeat after us: The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), in development on 128 acres of the former U.S. Steel South Works site on Chicago’s South Side, will not be a collection of power-sucking, water-drinking data centers.

Repeat after us: Quantum computing is not threatening to take over humanity.

The emergent technology commonly known as artificial intelligence is demanding data centers to allow it to feed on everything humans have written down, including our editorials and this newspaper’s stories, and then being trained on all of that data to enable it to think for itself, kinda. Quantum computing draws on the strange laws of subatomic physics to perform certain calculations far faster than conventional computers ever could. It lives in a world of math, you might say, and inhabits an abstract landscape of qubits, algorithms and probabilities.

It does not hallucinate on your laptop, edit your journal or write your emails in your own voice.

Why do we feel this need to articulate what surely reads to some readers as statements of the obvious?

The answer is that we talked in some depth with the people behind the IQMP and we discussed with them the emergent political problem they now face when it comes to developing and scaling for Chicago something akin to a new university campus on a brownfield industrial site that long has been contributing precisely nothing to our economy.

They are finding that the fear and loathing of data centers and AI is confusing people. Understandably so, in the current environment. But we feel the need to help them set the record straight.

Why does Chicago have this IQMP when so few cities do?

Simply put, IQMP CEO and University of Illinois professor Harley Johnson told us, it’s because the federal government years ago recognized the combined quantum research potential of Chicagoland’s great universities and research centers, such as the University of Illinois system, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Fermilab and the Argonne National Laboratory, sparking initial funding that got this city ahead of a competitive pack.

IQMP is being managed and operated as a so-called University Related Organization (URO), an LLC owned by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. But all these trusted local institutions have a say in the governance of the IQMP, which stands to create as many as 10,000 jobs working for such private-sector tenants as IBM, Pasqal, PSIQuantum and Quantum Machines. Palo Alto, California-based PSIQuantum is an anchor tenant, and President and CEO Victor Peng was happy to tell us that his company intended to build at the IQMP the world’s first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer.

Brad Henderson, the CEO of P33, an organization formed to drive technology initiatives in Chicagoland, told us that university and private-sector buildings will stand side by side as the park is built out. He also pointed out that these new jobs are not all for Ph.D’s or brainiac computing whizzes; many will be what Henderson called “accessible white-collar work,” involving looking after buildings, systems and machines and doing similar tasks to what you might find at a technological university. And, of course, these decent jobs will be located proximate to an economically disadvantaged section of Chicago.

Henderson and Johnson also insisted that the new Quantum campus will be a good steward of its lakefront setting, preserving and even expanding access to Lake Michigan and maintaining the existing parkland. You will, they said, be able to walk your dog around the variety of buildings expected to emerge there over the next several years. And the two men promised expansive “community programming,” such as supporting a science olympiad, which, let’s just stipulate, was not one of the things top of mind for U.S. Steel at this site, back in the day.

Unsurprisingly, given that these are halcyon days for NIMBY groups, there have been objectors to what feels to us like something all Chicagoans should support. Mayor Brandon Johnson found himself somewhat ambushed at one of those meetings and, to his credit, the mayor did not stoke these irrational fears.

Certainly, the IQMP should be held to its economic, aesthetic and environment promises. But this is a feature, not a bug, in Chicago’s future.

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