The Bay Area Has All the Pieces of a Quantum Empire — Except Something Connecting and Coordinating Them
Imagine a football team with the best players at every position, plus unlimited money and a top-tier practice facility — but no coach calling plays. That’s roughly where the Bay Area stands in quantum computing today, according to a new analysis prepared for the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium (BASIC). The report will help inform work the state is currently doing under legislation (AB 940) passed last year authorizing and directing the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) to develop a statewide quantum strategy.
Read: The Bay Area’s Quantum Ecosystem: Building and Sustaining Global Leadership>>
Quantum computers use the strange properties of physics to solve certain problems that would take ordinary computers millions of years — with major implications for medicine, materials science, and AI. The Bay Area has more of the ingredients for quantum leadership than anywhere else in the country: five federal research labs, top universities, marquee companies like Google, IBM, Rigetti, and PsiQuantum, and the deepest pool of venture capital in the nation.
But the report’s authors found a real problem: nobody is specifically focused on turning those ingredients into a coordinated regional strategy — and rival regions are moving faster. To address the gaps in our quantum competitiveness and elevate the Bay Area’s quantum leadership, the report makes five recommendations:
Charter a Bay Area Regional Coordinating Entity. Other states have created dedicated organizations to coordinate universities, suppliers, and companies and compete for federal dollars. California has a statewide quantum strategy but nothing at the regional level to execute it. Chartering a single regional coordinating organization — potentially housed at the Bay Area Council, the University of California, or a new nonprofit — would provide that necessary coordinating power.
Establish a Regional Supply-Chain Visibility Initiative. Critical parts — like the refrigeration equipment needed to cool quantum chips to nearly absolute zero — come from just one or two overseas suppliers, and no one is tracking that risk regionally. Creating a confidential, regional supply-chain visibility survey so companies can report their dependencies without tipping off competitors would give our region its first shared picture of where it’s exposed.
Convene a Regional End-User Demand-Aggregation Coalition. Banks, biotech firms, and defense contractors are interested in quantum but aren’t yet buying at scale, and there’s no group organizing that demand. Convening a regional coalition of end-user companies to pool their use cases and buying power would transform scattered curiosity into a signal strong enough for vendors and state officials to act on.
Support Shared Testbed Capacity for Early-Stage Quantum Access. Early-stage companies wait three to six months just to get legal access to shared lab equipment — an eternity for a startup’s product cycle — so many send their experiments overseas instead. Building a central commercial testbed facility with startup-friendly access rules would enable companies to get equipment time in days, not months.
Activate a Sub-PhD Workforce Pathway Program. Quantum labs need technicians who can run equipment — jobs that take months, not years, to train for — but almost no such training programs exist locally. Launching a quantum technician certificate at Bay Area community colleges, funded through an existing state program (the Employment Training Panel), would help fill the workforce pipeline and provide a clear pathway into four-year degrees.
The Bay Area is home to the most diverse and powerful infrastructure for the development of quantum computing in the nation. The Bay Area reached its leadership position in quantum without a roadmap or a deliberate plan. Building them now would enable accelerated quantum growth in the Bay Area, so that the region, and with it California and the United States, captures the economic, workforce, and strategic returns of quantum as it matures over the coming decades.
