Four quantum technology companies just became the first commercial users of New Mexico’s ABQ-Net, the only open-access, entanglement-based quantum network in America. That’s not a small thing. It’s the result of years of deliberate investment, and it’s a preview of what New Mexico is trying to become: the place where deep-tech companies choose to build.
New Mexico Is Building the Quantum Economy
Blog post by Rob Black, Secretary for Economic Development New Mexico
Four quantum technology companies just became the first commercial users of New Mexico’s ABQ-Net, the only open-access, entanglement-based quantum network in America. That’s not a small thing. It’s the result of years of deliberate investment, and it’s a preview of what New Mexico is trying to become: the place where deep-tech companies choose to build.
Over the past several years, New Mexico has put more than $450 million into quantum technology: infrastructure, workforce, and the ecosystem companies need to launch, test, and grow here.
We’ve always had the raw materials with three national and defense laboratories, UNM’s Quantum New Mexico Institute unites campus research with Sandia and Los Alamos, world-class defense and aerospace expertise, and one of the strongest R&D environments in the country. What we didn’t have, for a long time, was a way to keep that research here. Discoveries would happen in New Mexico and then leave to become companies and jobs somewhere else.
So, we changed our approach. Instead of funding research and hoping the rest follows, we started investing across the whole pipeline: commercialization, startup support, workforce training, infrastructure. All of it, moving together.
ABQ-Net is the clearest example. Built through a partnership between the State of New Mexico and Roadrunner Venture Studios to attract founders from across the country, it solves a real problem for quantum startups: instead of spending millions building a private testbed, companies can validate their technology on a live commercial fiber network instead.
The network runs 25 kilometers of commercial fiber connecting downtown Albuquerque to Sandia National Laboratories’ Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, using Qunnect’s entanglement-based quantum networking technology. It’s the first state-backed network in the country linking national labs, universities, and commercial companies on the same live fiber. Aliro Quantum, Infleqtion, Tensora, and Albuquerque-based Bandelier Technologies are now using it.
But none of that matters without people to do the work.
At Central New Mexico Community College, students with no prior quantum background are completing a Quantum Technician Bootcamp and walking into jobs that start around $80,000 a year. They train on the same systems commercial companies use, so they show up with real experience before they’ve even graduated.
Brandon Sessions is one of them. He was a jeweler before he enrolled with virtually no quantum background. A few months later, he was building quantum networking components alongside engineers at Qunnect’s Albuquerque facility.
For years, the assumption in New Mexico was that a career in advanced technology meant leaving the state. That’s starting to change. Companies are choosing New Mexico because of the talent, infrastructure and research ecosystem we’ve built, and New Mexicans are finding careers they once thought they had to leave home to pursue.
That’s how an innovation economy grows. Research leads to startups. Startups become employers. Employers create careers that allow people to build their lives and futures right here in New Mexico.
There’s still more work to do. We need to bring more companies onto the network, train more workers and continue expanding the ecosystem. But we’re no longer talking about what could happen. It’s happening. Companies are building here. Students are finding careers here. And New Mexico is proving that with the right investments and partnerships, we can compete — and lead — in one of the world’s most important emerging industries.