Chicago steel site set to host RM40b quantum computer park

Malaysian Reserve

24-04-2025

Developers promise a surge of high-tech investment. But some neighbours fear displacement and pollution
by ZACH MORTICE
LIFE after steel on the South Side of Chicago can be surprisingly beautiful.
On a peninsula in Lake Michigan carved out by shipping inlets sits Steelworkers Park, a serene space on the south-east edge of the city that once held the roaring furnaces of US Steel Corp's South Works. Shoreline trails take visitors past giant industrial artifacts dropped in the landscape like Claes Oldenberg sculptures; a 26-tonne blast furnace bell and an iron ingot mould the size of a go-kart. At its peak in 1944, the mill employed 20,000 people. The complex closed in 1992, and today, only eroding remnants of its 2,000ft long ore walls mark its footprint, monuments to a shuttered industry, and perhaps to a past version of Chicago.
The cluster of skyscrapers of the Loop are barely visible on the horizon, seemingly a world away, and literally diminutive; the 440-acre (178.062ha) South Works tract is larger than the 35 downtown blocks enclosed by the 'L' train. It's a surreal synthesis of prairie, wetland and post-industrial void.
Now a proposed development seeks to fill this space with an equally surreal technology: A campus devoted to quantum computing, the first step in what's hoped to be a blockbuster new technology sector. 'It's exciting to think of how a totally new industry could take the place of an industry that was so important to that part of the city,' said Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park ED and CEO Harley Johnson.
Hub For Quantum Computing
The project was announced this summer, with developer Related Midwest planning to start construction this spring. The city rezoned the South Works tract for the quantum campus, including the site of a 300,000 sq ft building for Palo Alto-based PsiQuantum. Here, the company hopes to build the first commercially applicable quantum computer.
International Business Machines Corp (IBM) is also on board, with a commitment to create a national algorithm centre for quantum computing, with partners at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The deposition and etching bay of the Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility at the University of Chicago's Eckhardt Research Centre in 2022. The university has been leading research into quantum computing
Chicago's high-poverty South Side is not the kind of place big tech typically puts its money into, but the city and the state of Illinois have been building up the Windy City as a hub for quantum computing. State and local lawmakers, led by Governor JB Pritzker, have lined up to support the project with public funds, including US$500 million (RM2.21 billion) from the state, approximately US$176 million in tax breaks for 30 years and US$5 million from the city. Calling it a 'massive engine for employment,' Related Midwest said the entire campus will cost US$9 billion and could draw US$20 billion in private investments.
But some community members and advocacy groups have voiced concerns about the park, saying the project is moving too fast and doesn't take into account the environmental issues on the site, which bears the legacy of decades of industrial pollution. To ensure that nearby neighbourhoods get access to jobs, education, housing and more, a coalition of community members are demanding a community benefits agreement (CBA).
South Siders have seen versions of this story before: The quantum campus idea is just the latest in a line of ambitious plans that have surfaced for this site since the mill closed. So far, none have paid off.
A conceptual plan of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park
On the Quantum Prairie
Quantum computing is a heretofore largely theoretical technology that relies upon the head-spinning characteristics of quantum mechanics. Unlike classical computers based on bits — a purely binary system of calculation — quantum computers use qubits, which can occupy both 'off' and 'on', or 0 and 1 states simultaneously.
This allows them to solve certain prob- lems very quickly, crunching numbers all at once instead of sequentially. Commercially viable uses could be in pharmaceutical drug development, cybersecurity, finance, mobility, logistics and chemistry.
But building these devices in the physical world has proved to be a formidable engineering challenge. The largest quantum computer, an IBM processor in the New York City suburb of Yorktown Heights has 1,121 qubits. PsiQuantum aims to build a machine with one million qubits.
Located in south-east section of the site, PsiQuantum's anchor facility will be something like a new typology adapting a pre-desktop model of information processing: Computing as a service, with a big, costly processor located in specific place that can do tasks impossible for smaller devices.
Given this higher level of visibility and public access, PsiQuantum envisions a facility that will feel like a university research or business park, not a 'high-tech security closed campus', said Eli Lechter, a landscape architect and associate principal with the PsiQuantum facility's designer, Lamar Johnson Collaborative. He describes the facility as a 'collaborative space that, from an open space and design framework perspective, is a little more interesting'.
Renderings show a design that embraces its singular context. Clad in rusting steel like the artifacts at Steelworkers Park next door, it will swoop and curve in response to the local landscape, and regenerate it with native plants that expand this part of the city's ecological diversity.
'We're thinking about how the original steel industry felt out here, and trying to keep some of that harsher juxtaposition between these materials and the soft, native landscape,' said Lechter.
The plan, which he called the 'quantum prairie', is intensely landscape-focused, and will be planted with grasses, sedges and the wild onion that gives Chicago its name. ('Chicagou' was the French translation of the Indigenous Miami-Illinois word for wild onion).
These wetland and prairie plantings will provide a habitat for birds that travel along Mississippi Flyway during seasonal migrations. (Campus buildings will be equipped with bird-safe glass.) Swales and berms in the landscape will corral stormwater and also guide circulation and security perimeters, using their rise in elevation to engender a sense of seclusion and envelopment in nature.
The site for the computing park is surrounded by water on three sides, including Lake Michigan to the east and the Calumet River to the south
The Design
The PsiQuantum building takes on a dog-leg shape where office spaces will be located, clad in weathering Cor-Ten steel that will rust with age. It's broadly horizontal, but curved and sculpted with high-tech sheen. A series of triangular saw-tooth skylights peak over the roof line, mimicking nearby sand dune ecologies, and an outdoor terrace will point back north toward the ore walls at Steelworkers Park, keeping the past's industrial history in view.
Pavers will sparkle with pyrite meant to evoke the sparks of a blast furnace, a design flourish that illustrates a central contradiction. Instead of the dynamism and violent creation of the steel plant — the swinging cranes, the titanic buckets of molten metal — this will be a sedate campus for number crunching.
The spot where the work of quantum computing actually happens, the facility's 'data hall', as Lechter called it, also doesn't lend itself to industrial expressionism. A single-storey warehouse assembled from precast concrete, the hall will be filled with computer cabinets, with a modular design that should allow components and infrastructure to be replaced with new versions as they are developed.
Compared to the fire and fury of the mills, the data hall's mute architectural character offers its own commentary on the inscrutable abstraction and inaccessibility of the modern information economy, where PhDs tend to mysterious devices that base their value on being able to be, quite literally, two things at once. Meanwhile, nearly a third of residents in the adjacent neighbourhood of South Chicago make less than US$25,000 a year, and 70% don't have a college degree.
A significant portion of activity on the campus will be dedicated to determining whether quantum technology is commercially viable. The military's Defence Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will be on hand to monitor the progress of PsiQuantum from a position of critical pessimism, said Joe Altepeter, DARPA programme manager, in July.
'We will walk into the room and say, 'We're pretty sure whatever you're doing is not going to work.'' Since then, PsiQuantum and Microsoft Corp have passed through DARPA's initial evaluations, and the two companies are in the 'most advanced stage of their test- ing and validation programme', said Illinois Quantum's Johnson. 'I'm even more optimistic and excited than I was 15 or 18 months ago, based on all the developments that have happened with PsiQuantum.'
At a plan commission meeting in November, city council members had clearly fallen under the spell of the quantum promise, too. Ward 10 Alderman Peter Chico marvelled that PsiQuantum could 'solve the world's most difficult problems' from the new campus. Ward 7 alderman Greg Mitchell was even more enthusiastic. 'This is the last opportunity I fear we have to transform the South-East side,' he said.
A steelworker processed molten iron into steel in an open hearth furnace at US Steel's South Works in the 1950s
Steel's Long Shadow
For Mitchell and other quantum boosters, the third time had better be the charm.
Past redevelopment plans have been massive residential and mixed-use developments. In 2005, developer McCaffrey Interests began working with property owner US Steel to develop an entire new neighbourhood on the mill site: 14,000 residential units in single-family homes and high-rises, 175,000 sq ft of retail, and 125 acres of parks and open space. McCaffrey hired renowned design firms SOM and Sasaki to generate an award-winning master plan, but the project collapsed in 2016.
The next year, Irish developer Emerald Living announced a plan to build 20,000 homes on the site in Barcelona-style super-blocks, but by the spring of 2018, that deal was dead as well. 'The industrial heritage of this site presented significant challenges which, despite best endeavours by all, made it impossible to conclude the deal with US Steel in its current format,' the company said in a statement.
That heritage remains a sticking point for many people who live nearby. There's a long history of environmental justice activism that's emerged from marginalised Black and Brown communities who have grappled with the area's industrial pollution.
In the 1990s, US Steel performed a large-scale remediation at South Works, whose soils contained the toxic residue of a century of steelmaking, and a 1997 letter from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) said the site does not need further remediation. Local community groups like the Alliance of the South-East (ASE), who have been pushing for a CBA with each South Works suitor, said this assurance isn't enough.
'It's technically called a no further remediation letter, but it's no further remediation presuming that you leave the land as-is,' said ASE ED Amalia NietoGomez. 'If you disturb it, things have to happen.'
Out of the Sky
A 2003 letter from the federal EPA to the IEPA recommended the site for the EPA's Superfund Remedial Programme due to 'the potential magnitude of the contaminated sediment' and the 'potential high cost of sediment cleanup.' IEPA did not respond to messages about the need for additional remediation.
Along with a new environmental impact study and plan, ASE's demands include jobs for local residents, funding for measures to prevent displacement and investment in neighbourhood schools to connect students to the quantum industry. At recent community meetings, residents have voiced a range of fears about the project and the speed at which it is proceeding.
'This proposal fell out of the sky in July with no heads up, and it was basically presented as a done deal,' said Gin Kilgore, interim ED of Friends of the Parks, an open space and parks advocacy group.
In response, Related Midwest has pledged to do further remediation. 'The key word is that it's a process,' said the company's executive VP of architecture and design Ann Thompson. 'It's never, 'We're done, we know it's a clean site.' As you work across the site, we may find things that we need to deal with. There may be more money we need to spend to remediate something that may slow the schedule down.'
The IEPA said Related Midwest is responsible for '(conducting) further investigation and remediation as needed.' Lechter said this will entail capping surface soil across the site.
Thompson stresses the importance of community involvement, but Related Midwest has resisted calls to sign a CBA, favouring instead a quality-of-life report to bring development in line with community demands. 'We felt it did a better job of reaching a broader stakeholder group,' she said.
Related Midwest's quality of life report won't be complete until September, months after construction is slated to begin. Governor Pritzker declined to comment on the demand for a CBA, and local city council members Mitchell and Chico did not return messages.
Despite the sometimes contentious discussions around the project, the rhetoric of the developers and community largely lines up: Both PsiQuantum and Related Midwest have agreed to pursue training and education opportunities to connect local residents to jobs, and the developer has pledged to generate 40 market-rate housing units in the area. But neighbours who have seen big ideas come and go in this part of the city still want the accountability a CBA could provide.
'If it's not in writing, it doesn't happen,' said Anne Holcomb, who has lived several blocks from the South Works site for 15 years. 'We should not have to be a sacrifice zone for what Governor Pritzker said is going to be a gift to the world. If it's going to be a gift to the world, it should be a gift to us, too.' — Bloomberg
This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition