Quantum Computing: A New Technological Weapon for Capital
While the movement against data centers has grown in popularity across the country, few workers know about the dangers of a new technology: quantum computing. For some years, quantum computing has remained a feature of science research and small-scale development, with little commercial applicability so far. Now, development is accelerating as start-ups and tech giants across the globe race to create a quantum computer that could truly transform industry, security, and communications. Nowhere is the urgency of the United States in this race clearer than in the planned Illinois Quantum Microelectronics Park (IQMP).
A Displacer of Workers
In South Chicago, at the mouth of the Calumet River of Lake Michigan, lies sparsely vegetated, formerly industrial land. This is the anticipated site of the first commercially viable quantum computer in the US. For thousands of years, both the river and the lake served as resources treasured by the Anishanabee, the native people of this land. In the late 1800s, when US capitalists found collaboration to no longer be profitable, the genocidal and violent relocation of native people began. The land, now “empty,” was soon to be reshaped by a far less caring steward: US Steel South Works.
At that point, the process of monopolization and consolidation was evident. In a series of mergers, North Chicago Rolling Mill became Illinois Steel, which became Federal Steel, which was then bought up by the stalwart of the industry, US Steel. At its peak, the mill employed and exploited nearly 20,000 workers, who built the beams of the buildings formerly known as the John Hancock Center and Sears Tower alongside countless other Chicago skyscrapers. The steel mill attracted Chicago’s first concentrated Mexican residents, as well as many European immigrants and Black workers from the South. South Chicago became a strong, prosperous working-class area as workers sought benefits through unionization. But in the 1970s, as can happen in the course of class struggle, US capital took the upper hand, finding it far more profitable to move its operations overseas where workers were cheaper to exploit. At that point, the mill began to downsize and, since investment follows profit rather than human needs, the community deteriorated.
By 1992, the steel mill had officially closed. The land sat empty, at least from a profiteering standpoint. Coyotes, Black Crowned Night Heron, fisherman, and rock wall enthusiasts found a home in the small park built amongst the ruins and the wider natural area. Several projects have since sought to redevelop the land, including a plan for thousands of new homes, a Mariano’s grocery store, and a Solo Cup Co. factory. But all of them fell through… until July 2024, when Illinois state and local officials, led by Governor JB Pritzker, joined Silicon Valley start-up PsiQuantum to announce plans for the IQMP.
Governor Pritzker’s stated goal has since been to make Chicago the “Silicon Valley” of Quantum. The plan of developer Related Midwest and other stakeholders is to build infrastructure that will not just support PsiQuantum’s computer but also attract dozens of other tenants. Their aim is to bring an economic boom to the city. For the capitalist, that means big profit potential. But what does that mean for resident workers?
To answer that question, we can look at what the arrival of tech companies meant for the inhabitants of the Santa Clara Valley before it got its new name. For decades, the valley was home to thousands of Mexican agricultural and cannery workers. But in the 70s, just as the South Works Steel mill began rolling out of South Chicago, tech industrialists rolled into the Santa Clara Valley, bulldozing fruit farms and replacing them with tech factories. Disinvestment in South Chicago aligned with displacement in Santa Clara.
That is the promise of Pritzker’s vision for a Quantum Valley: high-tech jobs for a select few, and mass displacement for the many. Property taxes will go up, residents’ homes will be bought out or stolen through foreclosure, and rents will increase dramatically. Even seniors with frozen property taxes will see massive increases in electricity bills due to the energy-intensive infrastructure. Soon, more highly skilled workers with greater purchasing power, drawn to these new jobs, will become an even more profitable market for landlords and lenders. Whenever an opportunity to make a greater profit presents itself, capitalists will use every means at their disposal to do so, even if that includes pushing out an existing population. Destroy, displace, rebuild: the pattern perpetuated by capitalism continues.
An Environmental Threat
In addition to displacing workers in the area, the new facility represents a health and environmental risk. The workers of the steel mill were no strangers to toxins. Many former steelworkers died premature deaths from rare cancers and blood diseases induced by the toxins produced by the mill. Today, many of these toxins remain in the soil. Despite touting their no further remediation letters, concerned residents were loud enough to push the new developers to voluntarily enroll the land for additional remediation. A public report reveals that there remain high levels of arsenic, lead, and dangerous gases (VOCs). Yet industrial-zone developers are allowed to set their own safety levels for contaminants, and the additional protective measures approved by the IL Environmental Protection Agency are laughably minimal. Since construction began in December, nearby residents living and visitors to the park have reported foul smells and even itchy skin, especially on windy days.
Beyond the risks from construction, additional features of the quantum computing technology put Lake Michigan, an essential resource for much of the Midwest, at risk. The technology must be kept at extremely low temperatures, attained through cryogenic systems that use liquified helium for cooling. PsiQuantum has received tens of millions of dollars in state funding to order this infrastructure from Linde Kryo Technic (LKT), which recently settled a lawsuit in California, showing they discharged polluted storm water into a local estuary, harbor, and the Pacific Ocean. Concerning, to say the least.
Additionally, the Cyrofacilities require large quantities of water for cooling. If they are using the cooling technology by evaporating heated water into steam, that will add significantly to the 17 billion gallons of water already consumed annually by data centers. If they immerse the technology in liquid to directly cool it, that requires mixing water with chemicals, which poses a contamination risk. PsiQuantum says they will use internal water recycling in a closed-loop system for cooling to minimize waste and contamination, but even in a closed-loop system, each usage of water requires 30% of it to be replaced. These add up to suggest that Lake Michigan and local drinking water are at risk of contamination and/or significant drainage. Moreover, the water of Lake Michigan is not a limitless resource. The Alliance of the Great Lakes reports that increasing water demand from data centers is straining water stores (aquifers). If this demand continues to increase, it will threaten public drinking water, and also infrastructure, as communities sink into the underground aquifers. That is bad news for the entire Great Lakes region.
Regarding electricity, ComEd estimates a need for 350 megawatts of electricity, the equivalent of electricity for over 200,000 houses, 10x more than the number of people in South Chicago. The developers claim the campus will run on 100% carbon-free energy, but once again have disclosed no plans to achieve this goal.
Notice a pattern? They create a wash of green, then poison the air and water, as their predecessors did. And even with Psiquantum’s hole-riddled claims of sustainability, the other five announced quantum tenants have yet to make any similar promises. But hey, at least it can't be as bad as data centers, right?
Promoters claim that quantum’s faster computing capabilities will make data center servers more efficient, reducing their demand for resources. But having a faster car does not mean one drives less, especially in the capitalist system, where companies must grow their profits or die. And to add insult to injury, the developers also plan to invite data centers (plural!) to the park.
At the end (and beginning, and middle) of the day, capitalists are motivated above all by profit, not social benefit. Safety and sustainability are costly for the capitalist, and lakes and wetlands are seen, not as treasured ecosystems sustaining human and animal life, but as natural commodities ripe for plunder. PsiQuantum is a new company, so they do not yet have a treacherous track record, like most. But who’s to say they will be any different from the Silicon Valley companies that have been polluting local water resources for decades? Under capitalism, exploitation and abuse of human and natural resources are the rule, not the exception.
A Weapon of War
Quantum computing technology threatens to displace residents, and it poses a risk to the environment. But what does it actually do, and what will its impacts be? Quantum computers create exponentially faster computing potential through the application of quantum physics. Companies like PsiQuantum advertise that this greater computing capacity will be used to create cleaner energy sources, as well as safer infrastructure, and solve complicated global challenges. These are all possibilities, but the marketing obscures its real utility for the capitalist class.
The primary applications of PsiQuantum’s anticipated fault-tolerant, utility-scale quantum computer are revealed in their existing collaborators. Aside from one drug manufacturer, PsiQuantum’s existing partners include two weapons manufacturers, Airbus and Lockheed Martin, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. To add to this trend, the second confirmed tenant for the park is DARPA, the research arm of the Department of War, which seeks to study applications of the technology. This technology will not, in fact, be used primarily to solve climate change or cure disease, as the capitalists claim, but to create new, more efficient weapons of destruction.
Consider “Where’s Daddy?,” an AI program developed and deployed by Israel to target low-level Palestinian militants at home with their families; or 6th-generation fighter jets, used to devastate infrastructure without human pilots; or ICE’s increasing use of AI facial recognition, device scanning, and phone hacking technology to find and kidnap migrant workers. Just as AI has wrought innovations both profitable and disastrous to life, so can we expect quantum to have similar results, especially given its integration with AI and more classic supercomputers.
Why are politicians so determined to develop this technology? It is not just because it will help make faster, more efficient jets. Encryption and decryption capacity are touted as the most consequential anticipated feature of quantum computing. Take the 6-digit multi-factor authentication code you need to log into your bank, work email, or Instagram. It would take a classical computer 400-500 years to decipher this code. A quantum computer will only need 45 minutes.
Because of this exceptional capacity, researchers project that the first country to achieve “quantum advantage” will put at risk essentially all encrypted data—communications, financial information, health information, and sensitive government information. If the United States government is the first to bring this technology to utility scale, it will be able to decrypt, exploit, and sabotage the essential industry and security data of its imperialist competitors while shielding its own data from counterattack. Whereas if one of our competitors develops it first, the situation would be reversed. That is what Illinois Governor JB Pritzker hints at when he states, “If we lose this battle to our rivals of the world, I’m speaking specifically, for example, China, that will have major repercussions for our national security than none of us want to see.”
In the face of this rhetoric, it is essential for us as workers to be clear about who our top enemies are. We have more than enough food, housing, and resources to give all Americans, and many more besides, a decent life. Yet the capitalist elites of our country take the fruits of our labor and sell them back to us at ever-higher prices. In the United States, workers struggle to pay rent, utilities, and high food prices. Poverty persists as over 167,000 Chicagoans live on less than $21 a day, half the federal poverty line. Across the country, workers struggle, and meanwhile “our” capitalists bomb country after country and seek to build war computers while South Chicagoans beg for a grocery store and pharmacy.
The Fight That’s Necessary
This race to develop quantum technology is not for our benefit, but for the benefit of one imperialist bloc over the other. There are six confirmed companies at the Chicago site: three US-based and one each from Australia, France, and, most recently, Israel. This US-Europe bloc is competing with the parallel developments of Amaravati Quantum Valley, a planned quantum technology park in India, and the growing quantum technology industry in China.
The wars waged by our country’s monopolies are not our own. The race to develop quantum technology is in their interests, not ours. In the hands of the capitalist, this technology means the displacement of workers, the endangerment of environmental health, the conversion of South Chicago into a military target just as data centers are being bombed in Iran, and the bolstering of the US in its desperate scramble to maintain its place at the top of the imperialist pyramid.
In the hands of the workers, this technology could be used to meet human needs. While we organize to defeat the capitalists-imperialists, and until we workers take power, we must seize the opportunity to disrupt the capitalists’ plans, by supporting the fight against this facility and using the developing struggle to organize workers and build a fighting spirit.
As Pritzker panders to national and international capitalists through his audition for the role of administrative exploiter-in-chief (he seeks to run for president in 2028), workers in South Chicago continue to organize. Since January 2025, a grassroots campaign against the park, led by the organization Southside Together, has taken root and continues to grow, demanding that the state invest in the community, not Quantum. Last month, they gained attention when courts struck down their non-binding referendum against the quantum facility, for which they gathered over 300 resident signatures. In response to this silencing, they organized a community forum on March 7, attended by over 300, mostly South Siders, to demonstrate that, even without the opportunity to vote, they will continue organizing until this facility is stopped. In addition to the opposition campaign, there is also a campaign to negotiate a community benefits agreement with the developers, as well as a Southeast Siders for Quantum group that popped up right before the March forum, which consists almost entirely of small business owners and landlords. However, despite the presence of these reactionary and reformist campaigns, the community forum illustrated that Southside Together’s opposition campaign is the most organized front.
This is a local, national, and international fight connected to our overarching struggle towards socialism. Let us take inspiration from this community front and continue onward!
Down with Tech in the Hands of the Imperialists! Up with Worker Power!
The People United Will Never Be Defeated!