The startup behind Chicago’s more than $1 billion quantum computing deal said operations are expected to start in three years, a win for Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who backed the investment and is widely seen as a potential presidential candidate.

PsiQuantum Corp. will start construction at the state’s new quantum and microelectronics park in the South Side of Chicago later this year, Chief Executive Officer Jeremy O’Brien said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Chicago office. The supercomputer — one of two utility-scale, fault-tolerant machines the company is building globally — is expected to be online in 2028, he said.

The announcement, which comes just as Chicago is hosting its first Global Quantum Forum, would put PsiQuantum far ahead of competitors. If successful, it would also be good news for Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune who has tried to position his state as a hub for new technologies ranging from electric vehicles and batteries to quantum computing.

Quantum computers — which rely on “qubits” and can store data in multiple forms: ones, zeros or something in between — promise to be exponentially more powerful than their binary counterparts. The technology is expected to sort large amounts of data, and solve complex mathematical problems that would take current machines days, months and even years.

“We have a very aggressive plan to bring that site online in 2028,” O’Brien said in the interview. “The thing to understand about quantum computing is that it really enables you to solve problems of huge importance that are otherwise forever impossible to solve, not just impossible to solve today, but forever impossible.”

PsiQuantum announced last year that it would spend a minimum of $1.09 billion to build the supercomputer and become the anchor tenant at the Chicago quantum and microelectronics park, a 128-acre project shepherded by Pritzker on the site of a shuttered U.S. Steel plant. A 2028 start would also coincide with the next presidential election. Pritzker has positioned himself as one of the faces of resistance to President Donald Trump and is widely thought as having White House aspirations.

The company’s supercomputer would have a wide range of applications across business sectors, including drug development, new electric batteries and cheaper ways to produce fertilizer, O’Brien said. He added that the company is in talks with potential users of its technology including Boehringer Ingelheim, Mitsubishi Chemical and Mercedes-Benz, but didn’t specify whether they would be tapping into the Chicago supercomputer.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. are among companies also trying to crack the technology. PsiQuantum said it’s taking a fundamentally different approach, looking to build a much larger computer at 1 million qubits, instead of developing smaller incremental systems with 100 or 1,000 qubits.

PsiQuantum, which counts BlackRock Inc. as one of its investors and is in the process of raising at least $750 million, said it choose Chicago in part because of ample access to water, electricity and land, as well as talent, according to O’Brien and Chief Scientific Officer Pete Shadbolt. The choice was a “no-brainer” and the site already had a heavy energy infrastructure used in the past to produce steel. The region also has a legacy that includes critical science labs, Shadbolt said.

“It is one of very few technologies that you can view as a generationally important technology that’s on the brink of becoming real,” Shadbolt said. “Illinois and Chicago have this multi-decade history: first sustained nuclear reaction, Fermilab, Argonne, all of the universities, decades of investment into basic research in quantum information science, physics, experimental work, you name it.”

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(With assistance from Isis Almeida, Elizabeth Campbell and Sam Hall.)

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