Quantum & Advanced Computing

Pillar 01 · Growth · Compute frontier

Quantum stopped being a buzzword when it started being appropriated

The test of whether a technology is real in policy terms is not how often it is said. It is whether a legislature has put money behind it. Quantum has passed that test — just not here.

Illinois’ General Assembly approved $500 million for a quantum campus in 2024, and early state commitments now total roughly $700 million. The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park has broken ground on 440 acres of the former U.S. Steel South Works site in Chicago, anchored by PsiQuantum — at least $1 billion of private investment and up to 150 jobs in its first five years — with IBM, Infleqtion and Diraq alongside it. The state’s stated projection is more than $20 billion in eventual public and private investment. That is ninety minutes from Milwaukee.

• $700MIllinois state money committed to quantum infrastructureCapitol News Illinois, 2026
• $950KWisconsin’s largest frontier-tech award — shared across AI, robotics, advanced materials and quantumWEDC Ignite Wisconsin, Feb 2026
• 200,000Quantum-economy jobs the Midwest could hold by 2035Cited by the Wis. Technology Council

Wisconsin is not short of the raw material. UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Quantum Institute is a serious research base, and spin-offs like Dirac Labs, which is building quantum sensors for navigation, are what a serious research base produces. The gap has never been the science. It has been the absence of anything that turns the science into a Wisconsin industry.

Two things moved in 2026. In February, WEDC’s first round of Ignite Wisconsin awarded $950,000 to the Wisconsin Frontier Technology Consortium — the Wisconsin Technology Council with UW–Madison, WARF, gener8tor, Waukesha County Technical College and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce — to commercialize frontier technologies, quantum computing named among them. It runs to May 2028 and targets 24 early-stage startups and more than 50 jobs. In June, the Tech Council launched the Wisconsin Quantum Alliance to build the state’s quantum workforce.

Both are the right instinct. Both are small. Wisconsin Technology Council president Maggie Brickerman’s own read is that federal quantum dollars are currently flowing to Illinois, Maryland and Colorado, and that Wisconsin has “all of these components” needed to compete — the missing step being getting the technology “out of the labs and into companies.”

We are not asking Wisconsin to outbid Illinois; that auction is over. We are asking it to stop conceding the category by default. Quantum belongs inside the same state framework as the rest of the digital economy — research commercialization, workforce, and a procurement and siting posture that gives a quantum firm a reason to look north. Illinois has already broken ground. The 2027 session is the next one in which Wisconsin can answer that.