From South Carolina to Tokyo, Gov. Wes Moore’s 2025 traveling sales pitch to bring more businesses to Maryland has focused on a few key areas — “lighthouse” industries, as he calls them, that could ignite a new age of economic growth in a state that’s struggled to keep up.

The brightest lighthouse — or at least the one Moore has rallied around the most — is also the riskiest: The emerging world of quantum computing.

Experts within and outside the field say the potential of quantum is both enormous and still largely unproven. Using the technology to create vastly more powerful computers, all kinds of new advancements in drug manufacturing, navigation and climate change solutions could be within grasp.

Moore has fully embraced the optimistic vision — investing millions of taxpayer dollars in the industry during a difficult budget year while promising to make Maryland “the global capital of quantum.” At the Quantum World Congress in Virginia on Wednesday, he joined Microsoft executives in announcing a new partnership that will bring the tech giant’s expertise and latest quantum chips to the labs at the University of Maryland.

“The future of job growth is quantum. The future of wealth creation is quantum. The future of economic prosperity is quantum,” Moore told conference attendees.

But Moore isn’t the only governor who’s describing their state as the Silicon Valley of quantum. The competition is fierce, with those including Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who also spoke at the conference last week, similarly making investments and saying the “future of quantum” is in their state.

It also remains impossible to fully understand the potential economic benefits, experts say. Scientists, by some estimates, are still a decade or two away from achieving a fully-realized quantum computer, and some believe it will never exist.

“Making decisions about investing in this technology is always high risk,” said Florenta Teodoridis, an associate professor at the University of Southern California who studies the economics of innovative technologies. “But if lessons from history hold, it can have high potential. High risk, high return on investments.”

Teodoridis said there “seems to be more upside than downside to investing” in quantum. She compared it to the early days of classic computers, when IBM was creating its original mainframes and “punched cards.” It was impossible to know the types of downstream industries that would emerge as a result, from basic software to ChatGPT.

“That makes it very difficult in early stages of technologies like quantum computing to know how much value it can hold,” she said.

Maryland’s bet on the future

Moore launched his “capital of quantum” initiative with the University of Maryland in January.

Aiming to unlock $1 billion in public and private investments over five years, the initiative aims to leverage the university’s “Discovery District” and 10 quantum-focused centers that it’s built up over more than three decades. In April, a deal with the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, included an agreement for the agency and the state to provide matching contributions of up to $100 million each over four years.

The final state budget this year also contained an initial $52.5 million for the initiative — including funding for IonQ, a publicly traded quantum company leader based in College Park, to build a new headquarters.

Born out of the University of Maryland labs, IonQ has raised $1.4 billion this year, CEO and Chairman Niccolo de Masi said Wednesday. According to its latest financial reports, it had $20.7 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2025, though it had a net loss of $177.5 million in the same period.

As of Friday, IonQ’s stock had jumped nearly 70% in the previous 10 days after releasing its latest projections to investors and then acquiring a U.K.-based quantum computing company, Oxford Ionics, for $1.075 billion.

“At the end of the day, we are in this to be the 800-pound gorilla of the business of quantum,” Masi said in Virginia on Wednesday.

Moore has repeatedly praised the company and said it’s worthy of the state’s support. During an international trade mission to Japan and South Korea in April, three of the seven new “memorandums of understanding” that he celebrated were between IonQ and new international partners. Those moves expanded the company’s footprint abroad but not specifically in Maryland, where about 200 of its 400 employees are located.

Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, said it’s a “smart strategy” for Maryland to support the underlying infrastructure of the quantum industry. While the current focus is on research, it’s expected to “shift rapidly” to commercial applications in a way that will have broader economic payoffs, he said.

“We’ve seen this play out before,” West said. “When mobile technology came out, people figured out all sorts of new applications. The same thing happened with cloud computing … Quantum is like the next big thing, and there will just be lots of spinoffs when the technology advances.”

The quantum competition

Microsoft’s partnership with the university and the state, officials say, is a critical step in luring more quantum work into Maryland.

The move did not feature any announcements of splashy, multi-million-dollar investments or an influx of jobs. But Microsoft leaders said they’d be bringing in their own PhDs, engineers and technology in order to reach a “long-term” impact as quickly as possible.

That technology includes Microsoft’s latest “Majorana 1 quantum chip,” which uses a specific type of quantum bit that, according to the company, has yielded “a new state of matter.”

“There’s a huge amount of momentum,” Jason Zander, an executive vice president at Microsoft, said at Wednesday’s conference. “So it’s never been more important that we can establish a center like this to go work on that kind of excellence.”

Charles Tahan, a Microsoft physicist who also spoke in Virginia, acknowledged that it’s unclear “what the future will hold” as the technology advances.

“We need to answer fundamental questions. We need to move quickly, and we need to, frankly, just build it and see if it works,” Tahan said.

Most executives, investors and academics expect what’s known as a “fault-tolerant” quantum computer — a reliable machine that will exponentially improve computing power — to be achieved by 2035, though some believe it could be later or potentially impossible, according to the consulting firm McKinsey and other studies.

The arms race spans the country — from the University of Maryland and the labs at MIT and Harvard to Illinois and a consortium of states in the west.

Pritzker, of Illinois, last year announced a $500 million effort that partners the state and the Chicago region with DARPA. Elevate Quantum — a collaboration between Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming — has become a federally identified “tech hub” that’s estimated to create more than $2 billion in private investment around quantum.

John Gilstrap, an assistant secretary at the Maryland Department of Commerce, said Maryland is positioned well against the competition because of its research institutions and proximity to 74 federal labs.

Adding Microsoft into the mix “adds more validity” to the initiative in a way that will help draw other established names, Gilstrap said. He said the resulting research and intellectual property “can be translated or commercialized into revenue-generating products as well.”

Still, he said it will take a sustained effort by the state to turn the research into economic benefits.

“I don’t think we have the luxury anymore to just lay back and let stuff unfold,” he said.

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