Illinois: World-Class AI Talent, Zero AI Giants. Why?

In his recent book Breakneck, author Dan Wang posits a divide between "engineering states," which mobilize resources to build physical solutions, and "lawyerly societies," which use regulations and lawsuits to obstruct progress. While the U.S. broadly struggles with the latter, Illinois has carved out a unique niche as a Midwestern anomaly. This is the state that reversed the flow of the Chicago River to save its citizenry from disease. It is the birthplace of the nuclear reactor. Today, that engineering DNA is visible in the state's massive bet on the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) on the South Side of Chicago.

But as Artificial Intelligence reshapes the global economy, Illinois faces a critical divergence. It has chosen to be an Engineering State for Quantum, but remains a Lawyerly State for AI. Illinois has been active as a regulator.

In 2024, the state amended the Illinois Human Rights Act to restrict the use of AI in employment (effective Jan 1, 2026). In August 2025, Illinois enacted the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources (WOPR) Act, limiting AI in therapy. These may be prudent, but they don't build capacity, and they risk creating compliance overhead without the offsetting public GPU utility that keeps builders here.

There's also federal preemption risk: reporting indicates the White House is preparing an executive order to challenge specific state AI laws. If that happens, Illinois could be left with fewer regulatory levers and no state-level compute to show for its efforts.

By pouring capital almost exclusively into experimental quantum physics while neglecting the immediate need for conventional AI infrastructure, Illinois is creating a utility gap. We are building a launchpad for the spaceships of 2035, while our engineers are fleeing to New York and California because they cannot find a paved road to drive on today.

The Timeline Error

To understand the issue, we can look at what the money is actually buying. In late 2025, while Illinois officials were celebrating the groundbreaking of the Quantum Park, New York's Empire AI consortium had already brought its Alpha system online. New York spent its millions on Compute, namely thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs that researchers can log into right now to train models. It is a public utility, as essential to a modern economy as electricity or water.

Illinois, by contrast, is spending $500 million on Cooling. The crown jewel of the new Chicago campus is a massive cryogenic facility designed to chill quantum chips to temperatures colder than deep space. This is a noble scientific endeavor, but it reveals a fatal misunderstanding of the current innovation cycle: You cannot run a Large Language Model on a refrigerator.

The quantum computers being built in Chicago are experimental prototypes. They will not be ready to run commercial AI workloads for a decade. Meanwhile, the AI revolution is underway, on silicon chips for which the state lacks an integrated, capital-intensive procurement strategy.

We Need a Talent Compact

This divergence has created a Brain Drain that I have witnessed firsthand. Throughout 2025, I hosted a series of AI breakfasts in Chicago, attended by brilliant master's and PhD students from UIUC and Northwestern. These were the exact people who should be founding the next DeepMind or OpenAI in the Midwest.

But the conversation was always the same. They weren't leaving because they disliked Chicago; they were leaving because they were priced out of innovation. Without a state-subsidized compute cluster, training a serious AI model costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in cloud fees, a cost that New York's Empire AI now subsidizes for its students.

UIUC and Northwestern routinely place among the world's top computer science and AI programs, but graduates follow the compute. A Talent Compact should guarantee baseline free allocations of GPU hours for every Illinois grad student and capped-cost blocks for startups, administered by the Illinois AI Exchange. Pair this with industry-sponsored fellowships and "build-in-Illinois" grants to keep teams here through Series A.

The Lawyerly Trap

While competitor states are building hardware, Illinois' primary output on AI has been regulatory. The state legislature has spent 2025 debating rules on algorithmic hiring and chatbot disclosure. While governance is necessary, it is not a strategy. And I say this as someone who has built an AI GRC advisory firm in Chicago. A state that regulates AI without building it is simply becoming a rule-maker for California's colonies. To remain sovereign in the digital age, Illinois must transition from studying AI to building the infrastructure that powers it.

The Hybrid Bridge

Illinois does not need to abandon its Quantum ambition, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that it needs to hedge it. The state should consider adopting a hybrid strategy that bridges the gap between today's silicon and tomorrow's qubits.

Establish the Illinois Compute Cloud: Just as the state paves roads for commerce, it must pave the digital highway. Illinois should mirror New York's model by funding a shared high-performance GPU cluster. This would provide immediate, low-cost access to compute for UIUC researchers and Chicago startups, stopping the brain drain overnight.

Create the Illinois AI Exchange: The Chicago Quantum Exchange succeeded because it forced collaboration between competitors. We need a similar body to align the research power of our universities with the commercial needs of our Fortune 500 giants like John Deere, State Farm, and United Airlines, companies that need AI solutions today, not in ten years.

Build the Hybrid Link: The ultimate victory lies in connecting the two. By placing a standard GPU supercomputer next door to the new Quantum Park, Illinois can become the world leader in Hybrid Computing, using silicon for the heavy lifting and quantum for the breakthroughs.

Illinois has already proven it can mobilize as an Engineering State for quantum, both IQMP's cryo infrastructure and other anchor tenants make that clear. The missing piece is engineering AI capacity now: a public compute utility that rivals New York's Empire AI, with a deliberate hybrid bridge to the quantum campus next door. Do that, and Illinois wins on silicon in 2026, and on qubits when they finally arrive.

References

Wang, Dan. *Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future.* (2025). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/807437/breakneck-by-dan-wang/9781324106036

State of Illinois. *Governor Pritzker Announces $500 Million in Capital Funding for Quantum Technologies.* (2024). https://innovate-illinois.com/governor-jb-pritzker-announces-historic-500-million-investment-aligning-with-the-chips-and-science-act/

New York State. *Governor Hochul Announces Creation of Empire AI Consortium.* (2024). https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-unveils-fifth-proposal-2024-state-state-empire-ai-consortium-make-new-york

Brookings Institution. *Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How machines are affecting people and places.* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/automation-and-artificial-intelligence-how-machines-affect-people-and-places/

CS Rankings. *Computer Science Rankings: Artificial Intelligence.* https://csrankings.org/