THE WhatsApp message from IBM was ominous: four to six inches of snow was expected over Troy, New York and many places nearby, including my temporary home base — in Poughkeepsie — where I camped out with my two sisters.
The unforgiving forecast would turn my pilgrimage to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), into a logistical nightmare. Without proper snow tires, my sister, who volunteered to drive me to the institute, relented, and thus voided my attempt to stand before the IBM Quantum System One — the first one installed in a university campus.
The IBM team shifted to a video call. Though separated by fiber optic lines, in the first five minutes of my virtual meeting with RPI President Martin Schmidt, I realized that quantum computing is not just the machine. It’s the opportunities it created because humans built a machine, so humans can ask the questions, only with the computing power of the quantum machine can help answer.
"If quantum computing is really going to be there in 2029, fully error-corrected, we need to get going," President Schmidt told me, leaning into the camera with an urgency that pierced through the digital divide. He was talking about the a-ha moment that led to the decision to procure System One.
That urgency is the heartbeat of RPI’s daring $150-million leap.
In early 2024, they became the first university in the world to house a 127-qubit utility-scale quantum computer using IBM’s Quantum 'Eagle' processor. For Schmidt, a former Provost at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the decision wasn't just about prestige; it was about avoiding a repeat of history.
He recalled the "ChatGPT moment" — the sudden explosion of AI that caught many academic institutions flat-footed. He sees 2029 as the quantum equivalent. "We weren't prepared for the ChatGPT moment," he admitted. He is determined that RPI will not be caught unprepared for the quantum revolution.
The gamble is already paying off in unexpected ways.
Schmidt shared a story that would make any university administrator smile. After they announced in June 2023 that they would be getting the quantum computer, they discovered that about 40 undergraduates had created a “Quantum Computing Club” of their own volition a year earlier. The club had been meeting in the evenings, collaborating with experts within the quantum computing community to teach themselves the basics.
Today, that club has swelled to over 500 members.
"The existence of the (quantum) computer and the fact that students have unlimited access to it has inspired them," Schmidt noted. This led the quantum club to grow significantly, expanding the pool of talent whom faculty could potentially hire to help with researching quantum solutions to classically-hard problems of interest.
This enthusiasm is fueling RPI's goal to produce "bilingual" graduates — not in English and Spanish, but in their core discipline and quantum computing. Imagine a materials scientist who can model new battery chemistries on a quantum processor, or a financial analyst who can run risk models that classical supercomputers would take thousands of years to crunch.
But what does this machine actually do?
I segued to John Kolb, who leads the RPI Future of Computing Institute, to strip away the hype, and I spoke to fifteen minutes after my chat with the RPI president.
"We're at a very nascent stage," Kolb grounded the conversation. He described the current state of quantum as "noisy." The qubits (quantum bits) are sensitive; they degrade. We aren't at the stage of "error-free" computing yet. Instead, we are aiming for "fault tolerance" — using techniques to ensure the final answer is accurate despite the internal noise.
This is where the RPI-IBM partnership gets truly fascinating. They aren't trying to replace classical computers; they are marrying them. Kolb introduced me to the concept of "Quantum-Centric Supercomputing (QCSC).
"Think of it as a hybrid engine. The classical supercomputer acts as the "entrance ramp," setting up the problem and handling the heavy lifting of data processing. It then offloads the chemically or mathematically impossible parts — like matrices with 10 trillion data points — to the quantum computer.
"In a sense, the classical computing is setting up the problem for the quantum computer," Kolb explained. This hybrid approach is the roadmap for the next decade.
And the roadmap is accelerating. RPI is not just sitting on the current System One. The university is getting a new IBM Quantum chip in the summer of 2026.
The implications for a developing country like the Philippines are profound. Listening to Schmidt and Kolb, I couldn't help but draw parallels to our own struggles and opportunities. We often worry about the "digital divide," but a "quantum divide" would be far harder to bridge. However, RPI’s model offers a blueprint. We don't necessarily need to build a cryogenically cooled quantum chandelier in Manila tomorrow. We need to build the workforce that knows how to "talk" to one.
The Philippines is already taking baby steps. The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) has launched the Quantum Circuit Simulator (QCS) project, and universities like the Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP) have inaugurated labs like QISLaP (Quantum and Intelligent Systems Laboratory for Power Engineering).
RPI’s example suggests we need to go broader. We shouldn't just be teaching quantum physics to physicists. We need to be teaching quantum algorithms to our logistics professionals at the Port of Manila, to the meteorologists at Ateneo, the student engineers at Mapua, our energy grid operators in Luzon, and to our chemists at UP Diliman.
Schmidt’s concept of the "bilingual" graduate is exactly what Philippine universities should emulate. We can leverage cloud access to IBM Quantum systems, which are located in IBM’s Quantum Data Centers in Poughkeepsie, New York and Europe, to train students without the multimillion-dollar infrastructure costs. If RPI can grow a student club from 40 to 500 just by providing access and opportunity, imagine the potential of the Filipino student body, known for its adaptability and tech-savviness.
Kolb left me with a final, mind-bending thought on the speed of progress.
Most technologists know Moore’s Law, where classical computing power doubles every two years.
Nvidia co-founder and RPI alumni Curtis Priem, a major donor behind the $150 million initiative that brought the IBM Quantum System One to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, calculated that quantum computing power is currently doubling effectively every 19 hours.
This calculation is a look into the quantum future. And it isn't coming in weeks or months. It’s rushing toward us at a velocity that makes Moore’s Law look like a crawl. For the Philippines, the time to start learning the language of quantum is now, before we find ourselves staring at a 2029 "ChatGPT moment," wondering what just happened.