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State and UNM team up to build a quantum workforce in New Mexico

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August 26, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

New Mexico is allocating $3 million to the University of New Mexico’s Quantum New Mexico Institute (QNM-I) to expand quantum research and workforce development. This investment is part of a larger state commitment exceeding $450 million, intended to establish New Mexico as a national leader in quantum innovation through university-lab-industry partnerships and a new entrepreneur-in-residence program.

“The future of quantum is being built today, and New Mexico has a unique opportunity to lead,” said Economic Development Cabinet Secretary Rob Black. University of New Mexico President Steven Goldstein added, “This partnership allows us to build on the extraordinary work of UNM’s faculty.”

$3 Million Investment Expands Quantum New Mexico Institute’s Priorities

This funding prioritizes expanding quantum education programs, reaching educators and high school students to cultivate a skilled workforce for the growing industry. Quantum Insider projects the global quantum technology industry will exceed $4 billion by 2028, and New Mexico aims to capture a significant portion of that growth. A key component of this strategy is the establishment of an entrepreneur-in-residence program at UNM, designed to translate laboratory discoveries into viable businesses and create economic opportunities within the state.

University-lab-industry partnerships will also receive support, facilitating the transfer of quantum technologies from academic research into commercial applications. Vice President for Research Ellen Fisher explained that, “This investment helps ensure that discoveries and advances made in our laboratories can become real-world solutions, transformative student experiences, and economic opportunities for many New Mexicans.” The state’s total commitment to building a quantum ecosystem exceeds $450 million, signaling a long-term strategy beyond this initial partnership. QNM-I’s research focuses on applications spanning computing, sensing, communications, and national security, areas expected to be significantly impacted by advancements in quantum science.

The future of quantum is being built today, and New Mexico has a unique opportunity to lead.

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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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