Quantum Funding, Partnerships

Illinois Quantum Park and Q-STAR Sign Funding Access Memorandum

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July 23, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Harley Johnson, CEO of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, and Hirofumi Mori, Chair of the Global Consortium Alliances Working Group at Q-STAR, formalized a partnership at the Global Quantum Forum in Chicago to bolster quantum technology commercialization between Illinois and Japan. The memorandum of understanding between the two organizations will facilitate access to funding, networks, and investment resources for quantum startups and small and medium enterprises in both countries. This agreement builds on a commitment between Illinois and Japan to advance quantum technology, now focused on expanding industrial supply chain growth. “The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park is a place where quantum companies can build, grow, and develop technology with the potential to unlock solutions to complex problems,” Johnson said. “This new partnership with Q-STAR is an important step towards that vision.”

Q-STAR and IQMP will also pursue joint research initiatives and co-development of new technologies, solidifying the link between the two regions. Johnson added that they are proud to open opportunities for Japan’s companies to connect with their ecosystem and to advance the longstanding collaboration between Illinois and Japan.

The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park is a place where the world’s quantum companies can build, grow, and develop the technology that has the potential to unlock solutions to the world’s most complex problems.

Harley Johnson, CEO of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park

This agreement expands upon a pre-existing commitment between the two regions, now prioritizing industrial supply chain development alongside research.

We’re proud to open the door for Japan’s leading companies to plug into our thriving ecosystem and to advance the longstanding collaboration between the state and Japan.

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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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