Sitting in a swivel chair in a hotel conference room, Victor Peng stares out the window at the Chicago River with a look of amazement. The 66-year-old CEO of PsiQuantum, the anchor tenant of the planned 128-acre Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park in South Chicago, has been at the forefront of technological innovation for more than 40 years. Previously the CEO of Xilinx, he was a leading figure in the semiconductor industry, which has been a monumental force in the advent of AI. But even he is surprised that the realization of quantum computing is nearly here.
“More than a decade ago, I remember talking to my chief technology officer and asking about quantum,” Peng says. “You know, ‘Are we getting close?’ He said, ‘We should keep an eye on it, but we’ve still got some time.’ And lo and behold, it’s about time.”
By leveraging quantum mechanics, this type of computing accelerates processing speeds and technological progress exponentially. And South Chicago could be ground zero for it, as PsiQuantum, based in Palo Alto, California, plans to build what it describes as the “first commercially useful quantum computer” there.
Twenty years ago, I couldn’t have foreseen that my phone would be able to do everything for me. What kind of impact will quantum computing someday have on our daily lives?
Over time, it will affect pretty much every aspect. Getting to more effective drugs sooner, understanding how certain proteins in our bodies work, finding alternatives to rare earth minerals and more sources of energy, finding better and more effective fertilizer — understanding all of that at a very detailed level is what quantum can do for us. That level of insight is going to increase humankind’s knowledge. It sounds profound. It is profound. Over time there will be businesses and things we can’t even imagine. It also could improve AI, because it creates a tremendous amount of detailed data, and, as we all know, AI gets better if you give it good data. When I started in the industry in my early 20s, it was only mainframes. It wasn’t even the PC yet. You didn’t have computers in your cars, home, and dishwasher. I’m not saying you’re going to have a quantum computer in your phone, but the innovations will affect everything.
Your career has been centered around classical computing, working with CPUs and GPUs. Does that experience have any bearing on quantum computing?
Quantum is a very different form of computing, which is one of the things I find so exciting about it, but it’s still computing. Right now it seems like a specialized thing, but the reality is, it has to work with classical computing. So you need to set up the problem, then you run things on the quantum computer, then you need to interpret it.
What will this quantum computer look like?
Think of it as [the equivalent of] a modest-sized data center, not these gigantic AI data centers you hear that are gigawatts or multiple gigawatts. We’re talking about tens of megawatts. We’re in such early days that, in the future, you’re going to see these things shrink and get denser. Your phone is probably 10,000 times more powerful than early computers, and you can carry that in your pocket. You’ll also see them expand, depending on what types of problems you’re trying to solve.
A supercomputer is about the size of a basketball court. Will this be that big?
Not as big as a football field, but bigger than a basketball court.
