As interest in AI and its use has dramatically increased in the past couple of years, communities across the world have begun protesting against the massive infrastructure needed to support this technology. We may finally have a way to rate a quantum computer’s usefulness In the US, data centres are popping up in residential areas, their construction has been proposed on protected natural lands and, in places where they have been built, they have caused havoc. These enormous buildings produce a lot of noise and use huge amounts of electricity and water.
In some places, utility bills are rising and water taps are running dry. Community after community has risen up to fight data centres in their neighbourhoods. It made me wonder whether that battle will stay limited to AI, or if the scrutiny will come for quantum computing too.
Consider the south side of Chicago. The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), a 128-acre research and development campus that will house facilities of several leading quantum computing firms, is being built there – and it’s not entirely welcomed by its neighbours. The project broke ground in September 2025 with enthusiastic support from the governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, and Mayor of Chicago Brandon Johnson.
The most notable tenant of the park will be PsiQuantum, which is aiming to build the US’s first utility-scale, error-corrected quantum computer there by the end of the decade, and as early as 2028. Other companies, such as Pasqal, Infleqtion, IBM and Diraq, will also have facilities at the park. So far, more than $1 billion in public and private funding has been invested in this campus, which is situated at a steel mill that was a great source of economic activity for the south side of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, but has stood abandoned for decades.
In the long run, the IQMP is expected to bring $9 billion in investment. In other words, it would be impossible for residents of the nearby neighbourhoods not to notice that quantum is moving in, and at an ambitious scale. And some Chicagoans certainly did notice.
On 15 August, at an event titled “Community Over Quantum”, Johnson faced jeers and antagonistic chants from the audience. The meeting was organised by community advocacy group Southside Together, which has been consistently protesting the development for the past year. Southside Together didn’t respond to New Scientist’s request for comment.
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