On June 29, about 25 people met at Kiln in Lehi to edit a document. Physicists from all four research universities. Executives from IonQ, Moderna, and Northrop Grumman. A state representative in the room and a state senator on Zoom. The document was a draft of Utah's first quantum strategic plan, and the meeting, first reported by TechBuzz News, was the third convening of the state's Quantum Roundtable and the one where the effort stopped being a conversation and became a legislative ask.
The ask is small. The full plan estimates $25 million to $50 million in one-time capital plus $1.2 million to $3.5 million a year through 2032. The near-term request, aimed at the 2027 session, is narrower still: $2.5 million to $10 million for a shared testbed and workforce programs.
Illinois committed $500 million in state funding to a quantum park on Chicago's South Side in 2024, a figure that more recent reporting puts near $700 million. Maryland's governor has proposed a $1 billion "Capital of Quantum" initiative, and DARPA has agreed to match up to $100 million of that state's spending. In May, the Commerce Department handed $100 million each to three Colorado quantum companies as part of a $2 billion federal round. Utah's entire plan, at its ceiling, is a tenth of what Illinois has put into a single campus. The plan's authors say that is the point.
The strategy, spelled out in the document, is that Utah will not compete for qubits. The top of the quantum stack, where well-funded hubs race to build full quantum computers, is crowded and expensive, and the states already in that race have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars securing positions Utah cannot buy back. The plan targets the underlying layers: cryogenic control electronics, chip packaging, interconnect fabrication, and the high-performance computing required to run hybrid classical-quantum workloads.
Jefferson Moss runs the effort for Governor Cox in a dual role, as executive director of both the Governor's Office of Economic Development, recently renamed from the Office of Economic Opportunity, and the Nucleus Institute. He opened the meeting with the pattern he believes Utah repeats: not first on nuclear energy, not first on AI policy, but fast once the opportunity was clear. Ryan Camacho, the BYU physicist who helped draft the plan's technical framing and who led a 35-person Department of Energy Grand Challenge project on chip-scale quantum communications at Sandia National Labs, told the room that "coming in behind, I think, actually is one of our natural opportunities here." Utah gets to see which bets other states made and skip the failures.
There is industrial logic underneath the talking point. The largest economic investment in Utah history is Texas Instruments' $11 billion fab complex in Lehi, producing mature-node analog and embedded chips and supported by a federal CHIPS award of up to $1.61 billion that spans TI's three new fabs in Utah and Texas. Nobody built it as a quantum play. TI bought the old Micron fab for automotive and industrial demand. But cryogenic control chips run on those same mature process nodes, which means the state's biggest industrial asset happens to sit on the exact layer of the quantum stack the plan wants to own.
The scientific base is narrower. The University of Utah's April quantum symposium was organized around sensing, materials, chemistry, and algorithms, and deliberately excluded computing hardware. The U's physics department has decades of spintronics research under Valy Vardeny that the university says advances spin-based approaches to quantum computing. Camacho's group at BYU works on photonic quantum networking. Colorado has four quantum Nobel laureates. Utah has none.
The hole in the plan
The sharpest moment of the meeting came from Alexey Galda, who leads Moderna's quantum algorithms team. Reading the pillars, he pointed out that the plan names biotech drug design, optimization, and logistics as its pilot applications. Those are quantum computing applications. The plan's infrastructure dollars go to cryo-CMOS, packaging, and sensing hardware, which have little to do with running quantum algorithms. The plan promises software outcomes and buys hardware inputs.
Nobody defended the gap. Moss handed Galda the floor. Camacho conceded the omission came from his drafting team's hardware background. Orly Alter, who directs quantum computing research at the University of Utah, backed Galda and argued that algorithmic talent is the state's most under-recognized asset.
Nucleus
The plan's first pillar formalizes a Utah Quantum Institute within Nucleus, and Nucleus is worth a hard look because it is not yet a year old, is already the designated home for the state's technology future, and the money flowing through it has grown faster than public attention to it.
The institute descends from the Utah Innovation Lab, created by HB42 in 2023 as a state-sponsored angel fund for university spinouts. Its $40 million came from the Utah Capital Investment restricted account rather than a direct appropriation, a structure that kept even the Utah Taxpayers Association from opposing it.
In 2025, two companion bills rebuilt the apparatus. HB530 reorganized the lab into the Nucleus Institute, a quasi-public nonprofit overseen by the Utah Board of Higher Education, with a $555,400 appropriation covering its executive director, fund chair, and audits through 2027. HB542 restructured GOEO itself: effective July 1, 2025, it moved the Utah Innovation Center, the state's SBIR grant-support arm, out of the governor's economic office and into Nucleus, carrying the center's budget with it. The Legislature's budget records log that move as a grant transfer from GOEO to the Nucleus Institute.
The state money has kept coming since. Lawmakers approved $36.5 million in 2025, with another $63.5 million recommended in the 2026 budget, for Convergence Hall, the state-owned complex at The Point that will house Nucleus when it opens in 2029. In the 2026 session, the supplemental appropriations act added a $500,000 pass-through grant from GOEO to Nucleus. The largest addition came through HB373, Higher Education Innovation, which created a pilot grant program for higher-education research funding to be administered by Nucleus and other bodies. As introduced, the program drew on $10 million to $20 million in unearned performance funding.
BioUtah's legislative tracker records that a second substitute replaced that mechanism with a $50 million appropriation from the Income Tax Fund, and that the bill was signed in March. If that figure held in the enrolled bill, an institute launched eleven months ago now administers a research-granting program larger than the fund it was built around.
The personnel chart is compact. Moss runs the state economic development office and the quasi-public institute that receives state money. The board chair, Val Peterson, is a sitting state representative from Orem and a vice president at UVU. Senate Majority Leader Kirk Cullimore, who sponsored the enabling legislation, joined the quantum roundtable by Zoom. The entity proposing the spending, the office recommending it, and the body approving it share people.
Utah has run a version of this experiment before. USTAR, the taxpayer-funded tech-transfer program created in 2006, was wound down by the Legislature, its state funding eliminated in 2021. Moss raised USTAR himself at the roundtable and acknowledged it left legislators with a sour taste over what the program delivered relative to its cost. The audit and reporting requirements written into Nucleus's statute answer that memory, and so, probably, does the size of the quantum ask. A $10 million request cannot become a $300 million embarrassment.
But the arithmetic around Nucleus has changed. Counting the fund, the building, the transferred programs, and the new research grants, the state's cumulative commitment to the institute and its home now approaches $200 million, and the quantum plan would make that same institute the lead body for another technology strategy before its first audit is due.
Washington moved first
The urgency in the room traced to two executive orders issued a week before the meeting. The first, Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation, launches a national effort to build a science-scale quantum computer and directs federal planning for domestic quantum supply chains, component manufacturing partnerships, and workforce institutes. That language maps closely onto the niche Utah is claiming, which is either good luck or good positioning, and in economic development the two are hard to tell apart.
The second order, Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks, compresses the federal migration to post-quantum cryptography, with contractor requirements landing by 2030. Its premise is a threat called harvest-now-decrypt-later: adversaries collecting encrypted data today to unlock once quantum computers mature. The facility widely believed to hold the largest such collection in America is the NSA's data center in Bluffdale. At the roundtable, IonQ's Craig Miller suggested pairing that federal asset with the University of Utah's high-performance computing, which is standing up a 264-GPU statewide AI supercomputer this summer. UVU computer science chair George Rudolph went further and proposed that Utah make quantum-safe digital identity its signature move, setting a standard before Washington does, the way the state moved early on AI policy.
The industry's own clock favors patience. Verified error-corrected logical qubits arrived over the past eighteen months, and IBM has committed publicly to a fault-tolerant system by 2029, but no machine is close to the roughly 4,000 logical qubits needed to threaten encryption. The build-out decade is still ahead, and build-outs are when component suppliers make their money.
What the plan admits
The draft names talent retention as its single biggest risk, and the evidence was at the table. Camacho described watching most of his PhD students leave Utah because the quantum companies that would hire them have no presence in the state. This is the circular flaw in a supply-chain strategy: suppliers need customers, Utah has no anchor quantum company, and the budget is too small to recruit one.
The timelines do not reconcile either. The plan schedules workforce certificate programs to launch within a year. Rudolph noted that UVU's next curriculum publication cycle does not open until fall 2028. A pending NSF proposal for a statewide quantum workforce certificate, submitted by University of Utah engineering faculty Pania Newell and collaborators, could relieve some of that pressure.
The roundtable will reconvene once the draft is revised. A landscape report from Nucleus is due before the larger phases, including a fabrication node, go to future sessions. The first legislative funding request is scheduled within the plan's first six months, putting it before the 2027 Legislature, presumably carried by Cullimore, and in front of members who remember USTAR.
