TL;DR: Peter Chapman, the former executive chair and chairman of the board of IonQ, believes the world is less than three years away from a major breakthrough. In his view, people will wake up one morning to discover that a quantum computer has helped cure cancer – and realize that the machines had been quietly operating all along. "I think quantum is going to come faster than anyone could possibly have predicted, and it will shock the world," he told The Washington Post.
Maryland is planning as if that timeline could be close enough to matter. Gov. Wes Moore calls quantum computing a "lighthouse industry" and has backed a Capital of Quantum initiative centered on the University of Maryland's Discovery District in College Park, not far from IonQ's warehouse-turned-lab.
The state has secured more than $1 billion in combined state, federal, and private funding to expand research capacity and attract private partners. Moore's proposed 2027 budget adds another $74 million, including $20 million for a new IonQ headquarters.
Funds are also earmarked for the University of Maryland's Quantum Startup Foundry, quantum test beds, a Deep Tech Facility, and new faculty hires at UMD and the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security.
The bet is that early quantum hardware will land in a region already dense with customers and talent. The same Washington corridor that supplies contractors and researchers to NASA, the Department of Energy, the Defense Department, and the National Security Agency is now being pitched as a natural hub for quantum-accelerated chemistry and next-generation cryptography.
"The future of wealth creation is quantum," Moore said during a keynote at the Quantum World Congress. "The future of economic prosperity is quantum. And that's why, in the state of Maryland, we're focused on becoming the capital of quantum."
Big tech is taking notice. Microsoft plans to join the Discovery District, placing a major player alongside IonQ and the University of Maryland's physics and engineering labs.
Charles Tahan, a partner at Microsoft Quantum, said the company is striving to build "the world's best quantum computer" and that Maryland stood out for its combination of investment, talent, and long-term vision. "We need the best talent, the best technologies – from the best refrigerators to the best quantum chips to the best software," he said.
Inside IonQ's facility, the hardware reflects a well-established approach. The company uses trapped ions as qubits, stripping an electron from the outer shell of an ytterbium atom and holding the resulting ion in an electromagnetic trap.
For an expert audience, the physics of superposition and entanglement are familiar, but the engineering trade-offs remain critical: trapped ions offer strong coherence and all-to-all connectivity, but at the cost of slower gate speeds and difficult scaling. Maryland's bet is that this specific architecture, supported by public funding and nearby federal agencies, can serve as the nucleus of a durable quantum industry.
Chapman's case for urgency rests on workloads, not just hardware counts. He argues that a powerful quantum processor could model complex chemical reactions between drug candidates and cancer cells long before human trials, efficiently screening out weak compounds and fast-tracking promising ones.
He also points to logistics and manufacturing challenges – optimizing delivery routes or streamlining vehicle assembly – where quantum algorithms could compress search spaces in ways classical heuristics cannot.
On the other side of the ledger is cryptography. Chapman warns that a sufficiently capable machine could attempt vast numbers of keys in parallel, potentially breaking the encryption that protects bank accounts, medical records, and government databases "in a matter of minutes."
That dual-use potential is central to Maryland's strategy. If quantum systems accelerate drug discovery and industrial planning, the state gains high-value jobs and exportable services. If they also threaten today's ciphers, nearby agencies and contractors will need countermeasures.
Chapman says IonQ and its partners are investing in initiatives such as a quantum internet and new forms of cryptography designed to withstand quantum attacks. "We're building these things to solve cancer, not create problems," he said. "We need to provide the solutions that protect the world from the technology that we're developing."
The timeline, however, is far less certain than the funding. Many researchers still expect it will take at least a decade, if not two, to build a quantum computer that reliably outperforms the best classical systems on practical tasks.
The argument for continued investment is that quantum performance can grow rapidly as more and better qubits are added, meaning a platform that seems marginal today could quickly close the gap once error rates and scaling challenges are addressed.
Chapman acknowledges that quantum computing "has a long way to go," but he believes the tipping point will arrive fast and points to artificial intelligence as a precedent. "Before ChatGPT, there were a lot of people who said AI is never going to happen," he said. "And then, overnight, it just appeared. And the world wasn't ready."
In his view, quantum computing will follow a similar path: quiet technical work, followed by a phase in which the technology seems to emerge all at once.
Gov. Moore has continued to promote quantum as central to Maryland's economic future, citing the billion-dollar funding pool and Microsoft's arrival as evidence that the strategy is working. His administration argues that, with Japan, South Korea, the UK, and several US states all competing, the bigger risk is standing still. The Discovery District, they say, will support a range of deep-tech companies even if quantum timelines slip.
That leaves Maryland trying to time a breakthrough it cannot control. To justify the rhetoric and spending, future machines will have to do more than deliver isolated speedups. They will need to run sustained workloads that outperform existing supercomputers on problems critical to drug developers, banks, cloud providers, and defense agencies while managing the cost and complexity of error correction.
Until then, the payoff is mostly tangible but indirect: a new IonQ headquarters, a Deep Tech Facility, lab space, and jobs for engineers, physicists, and students who may spend their careers pushing qubits toward that hypothetical "ChatGPT moment."
If that moment arrives on something like Chapman's schedule, Maryland's early bet could look prescient, placing a cluster of labs, startups, and agencies at the center of a new industry. If it doesn't, the warehouse in College Park will still stand as a case study in how far one state was willing to go to get ahead of the curve.