Quantum Valley and Silicon State
What a new cutting-edge computer on RPI's campus could mean for New York
The co-founder of the AI chip maker Nvidia said he chose to study at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the late 1970s because it had a state-of-the-art mainframe computer. As I wrote today in The Wall Street Journal, now he’s betting that a quantum computer at his alma mater could reinvigorate the region.
Curtis Priem, 64 years old, is donating more than $75 million so RPI can have a quantum-computing system made by International Business Machines—making it the first such device on a university campus anywhere in the world. Priem spent a decade as Nvidia’s chief technology officer. While he cashed out well before the company’s valuation topped $2 trillion, he amassed a large enough fortune to fund multimillion-dollar gifts to educational and other causes.
The goal of his latest bet is to establish New York’s Hudson Valley as an epicenter of quantum-computing research in the country, he said. His vision is to create a critical mass of talent that will lead to spinoff businesses. While school and regional officials share his optimism, the task might be tricky in an upstate New York city whose former industrial primacy faded with the detachable shirt collar.
“We’ve renamed Hudson Valley as Quantum Valley,” Priem said in an interview. “It’s up to New York whether they want to become Silicon State—not just a valley.”
Priem said Silicon Valley has become “social app valley” dominated by such companies as Meta Platforms and Google and said he saw more innovative work taking place in New York. He pointed to the Albany NanoTech Complex, where semiconductor companies develop new chip technologies.
State officials last year announced funding to buy chip-making equipment from ASML Holding, a Dutch company whose machines can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and are essential to making the most advanced chips possible.
U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko, who represents the Capital Region, said he hoped the presence of the quantum computer would add “another layering of justification” to the region’s push to become the headquarters of a major semiconductor research center funded through the CHIPS Act. The Commerce Department designated areas in Colorado and Illinois as tech hubs for quantum, and boosters in both places are vying for federal funding for quantum research.
Situated on the east bank of the Hudson River about 160 miles north of New York City, Troy was a major manufacturing center in the 19th century. Henry Burden automated the process for making horseshoes, powered by water from a creek that plunges downhill into the river.
P. Thomas Carroll, a technology historian, called it “the Silicon Valley of the 19th century,” where industrial innovations, such as some of the nation’s first steel production, brought wealth. Victorian homes and institutions from this era give the city a unique charm, and downtown streets have recently served as the backdrop to HBO’s “The Gilded Age” series.
We’ll see how it all plays out!
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Journalist Lee Hawkins, a former WSJ colleague of mine, has just released a very thought-provoking podcast that reflects on his family history and his upbringing in Minnesota. Lee, who is Black, explains how intergenerational trauma is essential to understanding the contemporary experience for many Black families across the United States.
To do it, he traces his own family’s story to Jim Crow Alabama. Here’s how Lee described the 10-part series in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio:
I think it’s important not only to tell the family business, but to tell the American family business and to get the story right. That the founding of America was about business, right? And the fact that my family worked as free labor, and then under an apartheid system for another 100 years and still thrived. The fact that my great grandfather, Ike Pugh Sr., was murdered for basically daring to own land and to be an entrepreneur as a farmer. That’s important because he was killed and that was my grandmother’s father. He was killed when she was nine years old. And that murder was hidden from every generation. And over time, that 100 years that that murder affected our family, it affected the way that I was raised.
You can find the first two episodes of the podcast on this landing page, or subscribe to “What Happened in Alabama” on Spotify, your Apple device, or wherever you get podcasts. Episodes will be dropping on Wednesdays, and I hope you’ll join me in listening along.
THE QUESTION: An RPI graduate was intimately involved in the design and construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Who was it?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: Cornell and Columbia are the two New York schools in the Ivy League.