A rendering of the planned PsiQuantum campus in Chicago

PsiQuantum

People aren’t happy about data centres. 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.

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.

Other community and environmental groups have been engaged in the matter as well, such as Science for the People Chicago; Environment, Transportation, Health and Open Space; and the Alliance of the Southeast, according to the Hyde Park Herald, a local newspaper. Block Club Chicago reported that, at the event in August, the demands put to Johnson were simple: “Reverse the permits. Shut it down. Mayor Johnson, do it now.”

“This is genuinely exciting technology, and it’s easy to assume everyone will see it that way. But it’s human nature to be uneasy about change, especially change this size,” says Pranav Gokhale at Infleqtion.

Size matters

“Any project of this scale will draw questions, and we embrace that,” says Rebecca Carroll, a spokesperson for the IQMP. The situation is complicated by the history and context of the IQMP’s location. For one, concerns about environmental damage and toxins in the ground have persisted ever since the steel mill closed in 1992, though there have been remediation efforts through the years. At the end of 2025, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency approved a new clean-up of the property, and at the event in August, Johnson reaffirmed that these efforts will take place.

Several previous attempts to revive the site failed, letting down the local community, many of whom were excited about the prospect of new investment in their neighbourhoods, says Carroll. But she adds that the project’s developer, Related Midwest, has been meeting with community environmental groups since the IQMP broke ground.

These aren’t the only environmental worries raised by the IQMP’s neighbours, however. Concerns about the water and electricity usage of the new facilities abound, in part spurred by the destructive effects that AI data centres have had on other communities. “Opponents of the quantum campus likened the project to the xAI data center in Memphis,” reported Block Club Chicago.

Josh Sodicoff at the University of Chicago co-chairs the local chapter of Science for the People. They say community members feel that this project has popped up in their backyard at an alarming speed, and worry about its impact on their energy and water prices, as well as access to the jobs that the IQMP promises to bring. “The vast majority of people who now know about this [development] were not informed by the developers. They were not informed by the city. They were informed by people in Southside Together, who have been focused explicitly on just canvassing people in the area to let them know what’s going on. That lack of autonomy, especially when the thing that is being decided on is so substantial [and] does use our taxes, seems to have disgruntled a lot of people,” says Sodicoff.

Many local people who have been speaking out against the development want it to end, and for the federal and state dollars behind it to be put into things that they feel would benefit the community, like grocery stores and pharmacies, says Hanna He, who also co-chairs the Science for the People chapter.

I wondered whether another development at the same scale would face the same pushback if it weren’t related to quantum computing. “When we talk to residents, they don’t know much about the quantum aspect. All they know is that this giant industrial complex is being built in their backyard, and it’s not doing anything for them,” says He.

It is, then, tempting to dismiss the situation in Chicago as a problem of local politics, rather than a quantum one. Yet the opacity of the word “quantum” cannot be extricated from many of the issues at play. As Sodicoff told me, it isn’t well-understood by the public, so all sorts of narratives can stick to it easily. Having reported on the quantum computing industry for almost half a decade, I am keenly aware of this. Whether you want to argue that quantum technology will save or destroy the world, “quantum” lends the claim a type of enabling mystique. In Chicago, it also seems to suffer from the association with the other big tech story of the moment: AI.

“People are asking the same questions about power and water everywhere right now, and it’s possible that they have connected [this with] the IQMP, assuming it’s a data centre,” says Gokhale.

Carroll says there couldn’t be a starker contrast between an AI data centre and the IQMP. Unlike data centres, which are largely filled with machines, she says the quantum park will be filled with people. This means there will be employment opportunities beyond quantum-specific roles, she says, similar to the variety of jobs that are available on college campuses.

Her colleagues are already involved with education and outreach programmes, some in partnership with local public schools and city colleges, that she says could help the neighbourhood’s young people become part of the city’s ambitions to become the leading quantum hub in the country. IBM is also establishing a centre at the IQMP that the firm says will bring 750 full-time jobs in cybersecurity, data science, quantum computing, AI and related technologies.

Quantum computing technology isn’t necessarily dependent on the large data-processing facilities AI uses, but to become more useful, quantum computers will have to become physically larger. Does that also mean that they will gobble up more power?

Earlier this year, Olivier Ezratty at the Quantum Energy Initiative estimated that future quantum computers could draw anywhere between 100 kilowatts to 200 megawatts of power, a range that goes from the current needs of a supercomputer at a moderately large research facility to a figure that tops the energy usage of a small city. In other words, the situation is complicated even for quantum industry watchers and analysts, let alone for people with no prior knowledge of anything quantum.

Quantum ≠ AI

Recently, many who work in the quantum computing industry have also purposefully compared and conflated their technology with AI. Investors that may have missed out on AI are being urged to not skip quantum as the next big thing. Countless claims circulate online about quantum computers making AI better, despite the scientific reality being a lot less settled. Quantum computing and AI will surely be part of the same scientific workflows, but putting an equals sign between the two, or implying one, isn’t yet fully warranted.

For the past year, quantum technology firms have been switching into higher gears, getting ready to scale up and make their biggest splash yet. If all goes according to their roadmaps, they will be in the news more and more often, and the growing importance of quantum computing as an arena of geopolitical dominance – particularly in the technological race between the US and China – will only exacerbate this.

For activists like Sodicoff, quantum’s connection to the US military, such as through some of the IQMP tenants’ contracts and partnerships with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is already a reason to be sceptical of the technology and participate in the pushback. So, quantum computing firms really can’t afford miscommunication. The technology can’t risk being confused with AI or any other technology that has already raised electricity bills, caused noise pollution or become attached to ideas like bringing decommissioned coal power plants back online to produce enough energy for computing.

Certainly, the quantum computing industry also cannot afford to be a bad neighbour. If successfully scaled up and made useful, the technology stands a chance of making a big difference in the lives of not just those who live near research campuses, but people all over the world too. Whether it be by cracking the chemistry behind more efficient ways to produce fertilisers, advancing our understanding of materials for solar panels or shortening the drug discovery timeline, transformative uses for quantum computers are on the table.

“People get excited about quantum helping us address humanity’s challenges,” says Carroll. She shares a vision of the IQMP as a bustling campus that can be both an economic engine for Chicago’s south side and a place where researchers will work on solving some of today’s most pressing problems. The challenge lies in being accountable to the local community and addressing their concerns about the environment, infrastructure and what quantum technology will be used for.

Everyone I spoke to acknowledged that the IQMP is unlikely to be successful without the support of people who live nearby. “They are the people who are breathing in the dust that’s coming off these construction sites. They’re the people who are just wondering what’s behind this fence,” says Sodicoff. Simply put, it isn’t enough for quantum technology firms to promise that they will make the world better in the future – they have a chance to practise for a better world right now.