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Bloch Quantum Tech Hub builds board for a US quantum supply chain

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November 12, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

The Bloch Quantum Tech Hub will include representatives from the FBI as non-voting advisors as it builds a national quantum supply chain, a surprising step reflecting the growing need to secure emerging technologies. Initial funding of $30 million from the U.S. Economic Development Administration spurred an additional $25 million in commitments, positioning the Midwest as a potential center for quantum manufacturing.

“The Bloch builds a domestic quantum supply chain,” according to the hub’s announcement, and will use existing regional manufacturing capacity to reduce reliance on foreign imports and bolster security. The Chicago Quantum Exchange leads the effort, with a governance board encompassing universities, national labs and economic development organizations.

Bloch Quantum Tech Hub Governance Board: Academia, Industry, and Labs

David Awschalom, Liew Family Professor of Quantum Engineering and Physics, will chair the governing board of the Bloch Quantum Tech Hub, a structure designed to integrate academic, industrial and governmental expertise. The board’s composition reflects a deliberate strategy to support a domestic quantum supply chain and address security concerns as the technology matures, with representatives from institutions like Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Federal Bureau of Investigation leaders from the Chicago field office will participate as non-voting advisors, specifically focused on threat assessment as the hub develops its security infrastructure.

Beyond national labs, the board includes key economic development organizations such as the Illinois and Wisconsin Economic Development Corporations, indicating an intent to use regional strengths in manufacturing. Manufacturing Extension Partnership, the Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center, and the University of Wisconsin-Stout are also included.

The hub’s focus on establishing a robust domestic supply chain directly addresses a critical vulnerability; reliance on foreign imports currently hinders innovation and increases production costs. Requests for proposals, beginning with a focus on security professionals, will be released this week and listed at chicagoquantum.org/bloch, marking the start of a formal procurement process.

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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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