Two months after winning a $40.5 million federal grant to invest in a quantum computing hub in Colorado, members of a local consortium have acquired a 70-acre property in Arvada, attracted millions more in funding commitments, and, on Monday, put shovels to the ground.
That’s relatively quick in a realm where private industry must rely on public agencies and area universities to make decisions.
“Colorado and the Mountain West are on top not just because of the amazing scenic views but ultimately because of decades of innovation and startups that are right around risk taking and smart policy and startup entrepreneurialism,” Zachary Yerushalmi, CEO of the Elevate Quantum consortium, told a small crowd during the ceremonial groundbreaking. “Entrepreneurship is, of course, no stranger to Gov. Polis, and the support for this effort and wider advanced technology policies of the state going back decades is why we stand here today.”
Officials, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (third from right), conduct the ceremonial groundbreaking of the future Quantum COmmons campus in West Arvada. The site of the photo opp on Sept. 16, 2024, is just to the west of 60,000 square feet of old office and lab space that will be updated for startups and quantum companies to commercialize quantum technology. Polis’ dog Gia does not seem interested. (Tamara Chuang, The Colorado Sun)
The business park, dubbed the Quantum COmmons, is the next phase of the state’s Tech Hub effort, which became official in October after Elevate Quantum beat out hundreds of other applicants. The U.S. Department of Commerce program stemmed from the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 to bring tech manufacturing back to the U.S. and spread tech expertise around the country.
But the real plan in the Denver-Boulder corridor is to take all the super brain power spawned during the decadeslong existence of federal labs and schools like the University of Colorado — four Nobel Prize laureates for physics hail from CU — and connect it to the dozens of startups and private companies working to commercialize quantum right now. Another goal is to create tens of thousands of jobs, not all of them requiring an advanced degree.
Get that formula right and the region, as more than one person alluded to, could become another Stanford Research Park, a 1950s partnership between city and industry that became a cornerstone of high tech’s Silicon Valley.
“Quantum gives us a path to end infectious disease. It will cure cancer. It’ll turn back the clock on climate change. The things we know it can do will fundamentally transform civilization,” said Corban Tillemann-Dick, founder of Denver-based Maybell Quantum, which makes super-cold refrigerators to slow atomic motion so quantum computers can effectively operate. “That’s why this place matters. The Quantum COmmons isn’t just these 70 acres. … It’s our Bell Labs, our Stanford Research Park, our Apollo program.”
School of Mines becomes developer, landlord
On Monday, though, the Arvada site looked like a neglected, 1970s-style industrial park, with dilapidated asphalt roads and worn-down parking lots. There’s about 60,000 square feet of buildings, including one with labs in need of updating.
The property, just off Highway 72, is covered with wildgrasses and overlooks residential neighborhoods and a railroad track to in the south. It’s hard to miss with a 180-foot-tall landmark on site, according to the property broker. That’s the old lift pipe tower originally used by oil-shale company Tosco in the 1980s to research how to extract oil shale from rocks. But then Tosco left town and while property owners tried to keep it leased to science and research tenants, the site has been for sale for years.
Enter the Colorado School of Mines, a consortium member eager for the advances and opportunities quantum will offer to students.
“We knew that a requirement for any successful proposal was going to be to have a location where companies could get together, advance their technologies, share resources,” said Paul C. Johnson, president of the School of Mines. “That’s where we jumped in and said, ‘how about if we do that for you to make your proposal more competitive?’ They got very excited about it.”
Johnson said that the school had been aware of the site for years but hadn’t found the right use. And then came quantum. He’d kept the board in the loop this year and let them know they may have to approve the purchase fast. The federal award was announced in July. Mines completed the purchase in August.
The school’s commitment is likely to be “in excess of $20 million by the time we’re done in the next 18 months,” Johnson said.
That covers the cost of buying the property for $14 million, fixing up the existing 60,000 square feet of labs and offices (“Maybell’s going to have quantum refrigerators down in the basement that feed the upper floors,” Johnson said) and developing a shared clean-room fabrication facility, which is critical for companies building such sensitive instruments that might get messed up if someone sneezes. It sounds like a coworking space for startups and tech companies that can’t afford to build clean rooms of their own.
Mines is the owner, operator and developer of the property and at some point, it does hope to get some of the investment back. Payback could be in the form of cash, as the property develops and is leased to companies, much like Stanford Research Park.
The other return is the opportunity for students.
“Our goal is to make this successful so they continue to get funding and Colorado does become the world’s epicenter of quantum technologies. That’s our first goal,” he said. “But we’ve already had discussions about students having internships with the companies up there and students doing senior design projects. It may not be a formal classroom kind of education, but we’ve certainly already talked about having students there getting experiential learning opportunities.”
The money behind the quantum project
Of course, the $40.5 million isn’t going to cut it. But everyone knew that from the start. The federal funds weren’t going to be enough. If Elevate Quantum had been thinking that small, there probably wouldn’t be anything to write about today.
The U.S. Economic Development Administration, a bureau of the Department of Commerce that oversaw the Tech Hubs rollout, expected a lot from applicants. It wanted commitments from the entire ecosystem of schools, investors, private businesses and local governments. The federal grant prevented Elevate Quantum from buying property itself, forcing it to work with others to get that done.
“It’s absolutely crucial for us to invest in ways that we can level up and drive dollars from the private sector to accelerate the pace of the work we’re doing here,” said Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves, who was on site Monday for the ceremony.
No Tech Hub received the full $75 million offered in federal implementation grants. Graves called Colorado’s win “appropriate for what this is going to be able to do.”
“But our expectation is that this is going to bring in hundreds of millions, up to maybe a billion dollars or more of additional funding. That’s really what we’re trying to focus on,” Graves said. “And that doesn’t mean that this is the only grant that this Tech Hub will get from the EDA or the Department of Commerce. … My expectation is, as this is built and grows, you’ll see a slew of additional grants from the federal government.”
Financial commitments to the Colorado Tech Hub look something like this, according to its grant application and consortium members:
$40.5 million from the U.S. Commerce Department
$44 million from Colorado in refundable tax credits to help the buildout of the fabrication plant and lab facilities by CU and School of Mines
$30 million from Colorado for loan-loss reserves, intended to encourage banks to make loans to quantum startups
A $10 million match from New Mexico to support workforce development and infrastructure
$6 million from CU to build the University Quantum Incubator geared at very early-stage startups (an additional $1 million was donated from a private philanthropist)
More than $1 billion of private capital
Cody Moore, vice president at Caruso Ventures in Boulder, confirmed the “matching commitment” by the venture capitalist community.
There’s already a growing amount of venture investment in local quantum computer companies, with Boulder-based Infleqtion raising $193.21 million to date; Quantinuum in Broomfield at $325 million; and Boulder’s Atom Computing raising $90 million, according to PitchBook, a market researcher that tracks venture investments. Atom also just partnered with Microsoft to “build the world’s most powerful quantum computer.”
Moore wouldn’t share exactly how committed Caruso Ventures is financially. They have, however, invested in several local companies, including Atom Computing, Infleqtion and Maybell Quantum.
“I can’t give you a number but what I can say is the factors that investors look for … are here and they continue to improve when it comes to having a diverse talent pool, talent that is well paid and talent that wants to be here,” Moore said. “We feel as if we’re ambassadors for the state of Colorado, not just for quantum but for what we feel is a new Silicon Valley. We completely understand that Silicon Valley won’t be touched but we feel that Colorado can be a top-three market for capital and scale up activity in the next 10 years.”
Count Chris Ballance in. The founder of United Kingdom-based Oxford Ionics, which is building quantum computers, just opened an office in Boulder, the company’s first outside of its U.K. headquarters. There were many reasons why he picked Boulder, he said, but there was also a primary one.
“It’s for science talent and engineering talent,” Ballance said. “When we decided on Boulder, we really said, ‘Where in the world can we put an office that has the largest number of interesting people in a commutable radius?’ … The fact that there’s people there working in industry, in academia, on comparable technologies with similar skill sets, it really means that people can change their commute slightly rather than change their state or continent.”
Ionics employs about 60 in the U.K. and plans to triple its staff in the next 18 months with many of the new hires in Boulder. The Arvada campus also was part of the consideration, he added.
“There’s a very good reason we’re building up our team base before we decide on the final location for the build-out of our office,” he said. “Broadly speaking, office space is easy. Lab space is where you really plant roots and it becomes very expensive.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-16 22:41:00
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