Record investment in quantum computing is pushing the once-experimental technology out of university labs and into the commercial real estate market.
Private and government funding for this type of technology jumped to an estimated $9.3 billion last year, more than five times the previous annual total, helping to spur demand for constructing research facilities, chip plants and next-generation computing campuses that could send the artificial intelligence infrastructure boom to new highs.
The Chicago-based commercial real estate services firm JLL is tracking $71 billion in global quantum computing investments, including billions in real estate developments across the globe. A JLL report called The Future of Quantum Real Estate makes the estimate as it analyzes more than 240 quantum facilities across 35 countries.
The findings and interviews with real estate professionals challenge the common perception that quantum computing, a field using subatomic particles existing in more than one state to calculate at speeds far faster than traditional technology, is too early in its development to affect commercial real estate.
The investments are creating quantum research and development clusters on office and industrial properties from Seattle and San Franciso to Chicago, Boston and New York. In the United Kingdom, the University of Oxford's National Quantum Computing Centre Harwell is anchored by seven tenants, with other major research centers across Europe and Asia.
Quantum technology, considered until recently an academic pursuit confined to university and government laboratories, is moving toward commercial applications. Quantum processing is expected to lead to breakthroughs in how major tech firms from Google to IBM use artificial intelligence, as well as in such fields as cryptography, drug development and climate science.
More than $4 billion in quantum computing real estate projects are underway globally, with the most prominent being the 128-acre Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park that broke ground last fall at U.S. Steel’s long-vacant former plant on Chicago’s south lakefront, according to JLL's analysis.
Farrell Keough, a real estate broker with eXp Commercial in Charlotte, North Carolina, said in an interview that the commercial property industry is already feeling the wave of development. He pointed to an IBM statement this year that it has committed to spending more than $10 billion to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029.
"When a company that size sets a date, suppliers and landlords start getting calls," Keough said. “The science is still early, but the real estate decisions are not."
Technical challenges
Technological hurdles still stand between today's systems and widespread commercial adoption.
Quantum computers are powerful enough for specialized research, but unlocking their market potential requires that systems be "fault-tolerant" — able to run algorithms reliably by correcting errors. Quantum computer bits called qubits are very sensitive to heat and other environmental conditions.
Yet industry experts increasingly view these challenges as engineering problems rather than theoretical barriers. In one case, scientists and engineers at Google and IBM are working to perfect systems that use "logical qubits" to harness the power of thousands of more sensitive physical qubits to detect and instantly fix errors before they can ruin quantum calculations.
"Last year, we saw the momentum build and excitement really scale up due to a load of breakthroughs that created a kind of inflection point for quantum investment," Daniel Thorpe, head of data center research in JLL's Europe, the Middle East and Africa operations, said in an interview.
The breakthroughs include the development of advanced quantum computer chips and the launch of major real estate developments that are reclaiming underutilized properties in such cities as Chicago.
The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park is a federal- and state-backed campus being developed by Related Midwest and CRG that Gov. JB Pritzker and other officials hope will lead to a new generation of computing breakthroughs.
The project will be home to several tenants including PsiQuantum; the Silicon Valley startup this week announced a $125 million agreement with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a federal agency also known as DARPA, to help develop what the company hopes will be the world’s first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers.
PsiQuantum was announced as the first Chicago tenant in 2024, and it has since been joined by the likes of IBM, U.S. startup Infleqtion, Australia’s Diraq and Israel’s Quantum Machines. DARPA also plans to have a presence at the site.
Quantum operations have taken root in nine types of facilities ranging from chip fabrication plants and quantum-focused data centers to government, university and privately run supercomputing projects, according to JLL’s study.
Most of the facilities are modest in scale, typically less than 150,000 square feet, in centers owned by agencies or universities that host a mix of academic, government and enterprise tenants.
However, the ownership profile is shifting as quantum computing attracts larger pools of private capital from real estate developers and other firms, according to JLL.
Although engineering barriers such as error correction need to be overcome, JLL researchers contend that quantum infrastructure is already taking physical shape across global markets and is likely to expand significantly over the coming decade.
Changed development equation
"There was always a thought in the industry that quantum computing was too far off, that there were too many barriers, to even consider commercialization," Thorpe said.
Recent breakthroughs in quantum computing — error correction and fault tolerance, hardware scaling and hybrid cloud workflows — have changed the equation.
"Now, we feel like we're on that cusp that we're actually going to see full tolerance and commercialization sooner than we'd expected," Thorpe said.
States, municipalities and real estate professionals throughout the U.S. are vying to become key players in quantum computing, a technology believed by some to have the potential to create breakthroughs in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, energy, finance, climate science and national defense.
AI and cloud computing still dwarf quantum computing investments, with the largest tech firms planning to spend more than $700 billion this year alone on data centers and computer networks.
However, Thorpe believes that last year's record investments in quantum follow a similar trajectory to AI.
"Quantum investment lags AI by about 10 years," he said. "The early-stage investments that we saw in quantum computing were around $300 million to $500 million annually up until about three or four years ago, when we started to see it really scale up."
Private-equity and institutional funds have joined government research labs, tech firms and venture capitalists in making quantum investments, similar to the investment arc of firms like OpenAI and Anthropic.
The cash infusion has led a wave of consolidation and public stock offerings. Quantum-focused companies launched initial public offerings that raised $5.5 billion last year, roughly nine times the prior-year total, according to JLL.
Quantum hardware manufacturer IonQ raised over $2 billion across two secondary offerings in 2025, with other large funds raised last year by D-Wave and Rigetti Computing.
In May, Maryland-based IonQ used the capital to open a 22,000-square-foot semiconductor testing lab at Boulder 38, a technology and life science campus owned by Los Angeles-based Breakthrough Properties in Boulder, Colorado.
IonQ has nearly tripled its national workforce since 2024, when the firm opened what it billed as the nation's first quantum computing manufacturing facility near Seattle.
IonQ's physical growth "is a testament to the demand for our industry-leading quantum computers, as well as the commercial impact of our entire quantum platform," Chief Executive Niccolo de Masi told investors during the firm's most recent earnings call.
CoStar News' Ryan Ori contributed to this report.