The U.S. Department of Defense and tech start up PsiQuantum are leading the development of a multi-billion dollar quantum computing center on the South Side of Chicago. Named the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park or IQMP, Chicago city council rushed through the approval for it to be built on the old U.S. Steel Works plant on 87th and Lake Shore Drive. Costing an estimated $20 billion, the IQMP would border the South Shore neighborhood, where the unemployment rate is four times the city’s average, 42% of tenants make less than $20,000 a year and rising rents have caused more residents to have been evicted from their apartments than in any other neighborhood in Chicago since 2011.
Dubbed the “eviction capital” of the city, working-class people are experiencing nothing short of a housing crisis made possible by price-gouging landlords and the ruling class. In Illinois, the power to address it with local reforms has been gutted and concentrated in the hands of the governor. The Rent Control Preemption Act was passed by the state legislature in 1997, and banned any city or village government from passing policies that aim to slow down rapidly rising rents.
Rather than intervening to help working people in South Shore make ends meet, Governor JB Pritzker has chosen to give out$500 million in tax breaks to draw companies to a tech campus that has already promised to “deliver novel quantum chip capabilities to the U.S. Air Force.” Pritzker announced that his aim is to turn Illinois into “the Silicon Valley of quantum computing.” The problem is, the tech companies of Silicon Valley only worsened the housing crisis in San Francisco, displacing tens of thousands of working-class people from the city and helping to raise the cost of living to astronomical levels, the second highest in the United States.
Development partners of the center include the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Airforce Research Laboratory and the Chicago Quantum Exchange, an “intellectual hub” with public ties to the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and the Weizmann Institute of Science, also based in Israel. It’s being funded by BlackRock, Boeing, Allstate, Discover and JP Morgan. Why are the largest imperialist forces in the world who are also responsible for the genocide in Gaza uniting with the financial sector and JB Pritzker to invest in quantum computing in Chicago? To answer that question, we have to know what quantum computing is and the resources it requires.
Quantum computing 101
In classical computers, information is stored on a series of switches. At one moment, a switch can be set to 1, and at another moment, it can move and be set to 0 — two different possibilities, one value at a time. The switches on quantum computers, known as qubits, could be set to multiple values simultaneously: 1 and 0 at the same time. This is possible because quantum computers have extremely isolated internal environments, so their components can take advantage of the strange laws of motion only seen in the behavior of the smallest building blocks of the universe.
Achieving this level of isolation is no easy task. It requires enormously expensive and energy-demanding refrigerated electromagnets. It all occurs naturally among electrons in an atom, for example. Recreating this phenomenon to the scale of computer technology takes a massive amount of space and natural resources. This is why the IQMP is planned to take up 300,000 square feet and will rely heavily on Lake Michigan and the Calumet River as water sources for extreme cooling. The Illinois State website also lists “large power needs,” for the center, implying heavy reliance on the city’s electrical grid.
At the time of writing, there isn’t a single practical application that has been discovered for quantum computing. PsiQuantum is racing to build “the world’s first useful quantum computer” which will displace thousands, because the ultra-right tech industry smells a whiff of potential profits. The hope, is that quantum computing can infiltrate communication networks around the world and render conventional cybersecurity infrastructure obsolete. For example, the brute force technique of cracking passwords, trying every character combination on a keyboard until you guess it correctly, can go from taking dozens of years, to seconds, when a quantum computer tries every possibility all at once.
According to the Heritage Foundation, the ultra-right think tank behind Project 2025: “It’s a national security imperative that the U.S. reach supremacy in quantum computing and other technologies before China, just as Oppenheimer did in his day with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.” Project 2025 is a playbook for the billionaire agenda.
The U.S. ruling class is not just gambling on receiving enormous payouts from private military contracts from these discoveries. The race to develop the first useful quantum computer is part of a broader, desperate scramble for the United States to reassert it’s slipping global dominance by means of force.
Deindustrialization continues unsolved
In order to manufacture consent to build a quantum military cyber warfare research center in Chicago, PsiQuantum, Mayor Johnson and Governor Pritzker are relying on the symbolism and nostalgia of building on top of the old U.S. Steel Works site. In the middle of the 20th Century, the steel production plant steadily employed up to 20,000 workers. The boom in worker migration around the plant gave birth to the South Chicago neighborhood as it is today. Thousands of skilled Mexican immigrant workers, and later thousands of skilled Black workers (as part of the Great Migration) moved to the area.
The decline in production in the 1970s, and final closing of South Steel Works in 1992, directly correlates with the depopulation, unemployment and underdevelopment in the region that is devastating working-class people now. JB Pritzker openly implies that the IQMP will bring back the same levels of stability and wealth for working people, but it only promises to employ 150 workers in total. In 2024, JB Pritzker praised the development as a “potential revolution in science and technology and the betterment of life for all humankind.” But as data centers across Illinois already have, the IQMP is all but guaranteed to increase property taxes, raise rents and raise electricity bills on the Southeast Side, deepening the housing crisis.
Construction for the project has yet to break ground and when it does, is widely believed to unearth toxic chemicals and industrial waste that was never properly removed after the old factory’s demolition, which will poison Lake Michigan and expose nearby working-class residents in the process. When construction is finished, federal military personnel, Zionist “defense” scientists, and elite representatives of the largest banks and asset managers in the world would all soon become frequent visitors to 87th Street, increasing the level of local police presence and harassment in a neighborhood already heavily repressed by racist police violence.
Solutions are possible under socialism
The reality is, the housing crisis has simple solutions that are blocked by private ownership and profit seeking. But only an organized mass movement has ever forced the billionaires to cave to the demands of working-class people in crisis.
A quantum computing center has no business being built on 87th Street. Hypothetically, quantum computing could advance modern chemistry: making more efficient pharmaceuticals and powerful photovoltaic cells in solar panels. But it won’t do these things while it is held accountable to the interests of the Department of War, rather than the needs of working-class people. Socialism, a system where the wealth and decision-making power in society are shared collectively by workers, would put quantum computing technology to use for the healing of the people and the planet — literally.
Feature photo: The entrance to the old U.S. Steel South Works on the South Side of Chicago. Photo credit: Vaticanus (CC BY 2.0)
