Pete Hegseth’s Department of War is building America’s largest Quantum Computing project right here on the Southside of Chicago, to the detriment of not only our city but the world at large. Governor Pritzker has lauded the venture capital project as an unprecedented opportunity to make Illinois the “Silicon Valley of quantum development.” With whose consent? On whose land? And on whose dime?
When examining the backers of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), it is difficult to rationalize this $9 billion project as anything but an accelerative altar to militarism. Alongside federal backing from DARPA, investors such as BlackRock, IBM, and Israeli startup Quantum Machines have all cited quantum technology as the next frontier in modern warfare. The Military Industrial Complex has emphatically doubled down on Quantum computing technology and advanced computing in AI alike as the next crucial edges in 21st-century militarism. Indeed, AI technology in warfare is already being used extensively by the U.S. and Israel to terrorize the SWANA region.
Even with the considerable private capital financing already allotted to this project’s troubling big tech-war machine alliance, Illinois taxpayers are the top funders of IQMP by far. To the sum of more than 700 million state dollars, the land and water beneath our feet have been sold out to private equity military contracts. As families across our cities starve, as rent costs go up and our unhoused neighbors are continually displaced, we must stop the flow of state and city resources from being directed to a global surveillance state hellbent on mass destruction.
On a local level, the Chicago City Council has unanimously approved the Quantum Park’s construction on three separate occasions, with Mayor Johnson contributing $5 million from the city’s already strained budget. The contrast between the typical glacial speed of approval from City Council and the suspiciously rapid approval process of this project is jarring to say the least, particularly when one considers the largely uncharted nature of the technology itself.
Southside Together, an organization focused on building people power with working-class Southside residents, collected signatures proposing a non-binding referendum concerning IQMP. The petition asked one question: “Should our local elected officials stop the construction of the IQMP and instead invest directly in community resources?” Non-binding ballot referendums are rarely challenged on the basis of their language, yet this expression of community consensus was struck from the ballot summarily. Southside residents, in particular, breaking the silence on this project has been clearly delineated as a high-priority threat by backing city officials.
Widespread awareness and community dissent could in fact function as IQMP’s death knell. If organizing on the Southside alone has already scared these big tech military syndicates into such frantic repression, imagine what genuine citywide resistance to quantum computing development could accomplish in turn.
As Governor JP Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson push this project through, they are continuing to make the people of Chicago complicit in war crimes across the globe. Do Illinois politicians want this escalation in big tech militarism to be their legacy? More importantly, are we as Chicago residents at ease with the unprecedented horrors of Quantum and AI warfare coming out of our own backyards?
Southside Together’s campaign against Quantum is an unequivocal stand for people power against the cynical backdrop of Big Tech fatalism. Join the fight today against what Quantum tech threatens to do tomorrow.