Hoping to build on their success in recruiting financial and technology firms to West Palm Beach, area leaders are setting their sights on a new prize: the closely watched quantum computing industry.
Leaders announced their intentions this past week with a splashy conference downtown dubbed “Quantum Beach 2025,” where business and political honchos hobnobbed with tech executives and discussed efforts to make the region the country’s next technology cluster.
The focus was the emerging field of quantum computing, which harnesses quantum physics and the strange, versatile properties of subatomic particles to make computers that are exponentially more powerful than traditional supercomputers.
The field is still in its infancy but its promise is generating growing excitement and financial investment, leading cities across the country to jockey to position themselves as hosts of a coming investment boom.
“It really is kind of on the cusp of breaking through the psyche of the general public,” West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James said during a panel discussion at the Oct. 8 conference, “and so for West Palm to be involved in the conversation with this breakthrough technology is so exciting.”
While Quantum Beach could be considered a formal declaration of intentions, moves to position Palm Beach County have been underway.
Kelly Smallridge, president of the county’s Business Development Board — which co-hosted the conference along with venture capital firm Quantum Coast Capital — told The Palm Beach Post she’s already hosted visits from quantum computing companies scouting for new locations, prompting her to predict “a win or two” for the county in the next couple of years.
“We are taking interest from companies in this field already that have made a visit to Palm Beach County to expand their operations,” she said. “So we’re highly encouraged by the national names in the quantum computing space that are looking at Palm Beach County as a possible location. And that type of activity is very new.”
Why are quantum technology companies taking an interest in Palm Beach County?
A mantra repeated throughout the day’s conference, which drew more than 350 professionals to the Kravis Center downtown, was that companies are drawn, first and foremost, to regions with an abundant supply of educated workers.
Stepping up to answer that call were representatives from the state’s 12 public universities, who stood on stage with Florida Commerce Secretary Alex Kelly and signed a memo agreeing to work with the state on efforts to ready students for careers in quantum computing.
Not to be outdone, Palm Beach State College President Ava Parker made her own announcement from the same stage — that her school would be opening an “AI and quantum innovation center” on Fern Street in downtown West Palm Beach, near the future site of a Vanderbilt University business school campus.
The center, she said, would be a place where students can collaborate with researchers and employees at startup technology companies, complete with access to high-speed internet, a quantum-sensing lab and 3D printing spaces.
“We’ll be able to actually bring in those folks who are interested in innovating and building in this area and put them with our students, who can in turn be their interns and their associates and help them to make all this happen so that we are the nexus of what employers will be looking for when we’re building this whole quantum industry in Palm Beach County,” she said.
Quantum computing firms have different workspace needs
None of those steps guarantee that important quantum computing firms will choose to call the Palm Beaches home. But Smallridge said the region has natural advantages that could give it an edge over other quantum tech clusters forming in places such as Colorado, Chicago, New York and Virginia.
Florida business-friendly political climate and Palm Beach’s longstanding wealth combine with West Palm Beach’s growing finance and technology sectors to make the area attractive to new but parallel industries, Smallridge said.
She pointed to the announcement last month that California-based AI software company ServiceNow plans to open an 850-person regional office downtown and the planned opening of Vanderbilt’s business school campus — moves that she said will amplify the attention paid to the city center.
“One win leads to the next,” she said.
Attracting quantum computing companies, though, will not be the same as attracting finance or software firms.
Whereas the latter are drawn to Class A office space, she said, the former are interested in light-industrial properties, buildings with high roofs and dock doors and special utility arrangements to accommodate their electricity-hungry research.
How does quantum computing work?
Quantum computing relies on the principle that subatomic particles can exist in multiple states at once.
Whereas traditional computer processors use bits, which each convey one piece of information at a time via a 1 or a 0, quantum computer processors make use of qubits, which can convey more than one piece of information at once. As qubits combine together in a processor, their computing power grows exponentially.
The technology is in its infancy and practical uses remain elusive. Qubits are sensitive, error-prone, susceptible to interference and must operate in extreme conditions.
But many experts believe it’s a matter of time before companies overcome those logistical hurdles and produce quantum computers whose computational power renders classical computers obsolete.
Such breakthroughs could lead to revolutionary innovations in medical research, artificial intelligence and countless other fields, while rendering existing cybersecurity protections useless.
Last year, researchers at Google announced they built a quantum computer that performed a mathematical calculation in five minutes that a regular supercomputer computer could not finish within the time that the known universe has existed.
Underscoring the increasing interest in the technology, this week the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to three American professors for their research in the 1980s on quantum mechanics.
SOURCE : Andrew Marra is a reporter at The Palm Beach Post. Reach him at [email protected].
