‘Quantum Valley, better than Silicon Valley’: Naidu unveils PanIIT Amaravati Council, venture fund and five QShiva systems

Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu closed the PanIIT Andhra Pradesh Summit in Vijayawada on Saturday evening with a challenge to the alumni of India's 23 IITs: stop measuring India against Silicon Valley.

"From today, anybody will say Silicon Valley, you have to tell everybody we are having a better place. That is Quantum Valley, better than Silicon Valley," he said. "As on yesterday we are talking Silicon Valley. From today or tomorrow, we have to talk about Quantum Valley. That is Amaravati."

"Five lakh IIT graduates, brilliant brains, are behind me to take decisions, to take forward this country."

At the same session he launched five quantum systems built in Amaravati, and the state government and PanIIT Alumni India adopted the Amaravati PanIIT Declaration, which the organisers called a binding commitment between the two.

What the declaration sets up

PanIIT Alumni India vice-chairman Amitabh Ranjan presented the outcomes before the Chief Minister spoke. When they met on 25 August, he said, Naidu had told the organisers the summit "should not be just a one-day affair" and must leave something tangible behind. The declaration commits both sides to:

• The PanIIT Amaravati Council: a permanent body housed in Amaravati, run jointly by PanIIT Alumni India and the state government, to network the 23 IITs and their five lakh alumni towards the Swarnandhra 2047 and Viksit Bharat 2047 goals.
• The PanIIT Amaravati Venture Fund: to back start-ups and entrepreneurs in Andhra Pradesh as they scale, invest in research and create jobs.
• 10 industry-sponsored chairs in the state's universities, to build a research culture. India spends about 0.65% of its GDP on research and development, Ranjan said, against 6% in Israel and 5% in South Korea.
• A 100-mentor start-up network: industry leaders and founders worldwide who will each give an hour or two a month to founders in Andhra Pradesh.
• A technology-transfer pipeline to take technologies developed in IIT laboratories, from IIT Madras to IIT Tirupati, into industry in the state.
• A deep-tech policy package and a deep-tech fellowship, aimed at AI, quantum and other emerging technologies.

Progress will be published on quarterly public dashboards and in annual audited reports, the organisers said. "It seems like all roads are leading to Amaravati today," Ranjan told a hall he put at 2,000 people.

Five QShiva systems, made in Amaravati

"Today we launched five quantum systems made in Amaravati. All five quantum systems are named QShiva," Naidu said.

The launch film described a compact machine that cools quantum chips from room temperature to below four kelvin without liquid cryogens, with 100 signal lines running at up to 20 GHz and room for up to 10 devices at a time. The chip inside, it said, is designed, packaged and cryogenically tested in Amaravati: 10 qubits now, growing to more than 500 by 2028, built by a team drawn from Tufts, Delaware, Oxford, IBM Quantum, IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi and the Indian Institute of Science. The film called it "India's superconducting quantum foundry".

Naidu told the story behind it. IIT Madras director V Kamakoti phoned him, he said, about IBM's offer to bring a quantum computer to India; within a month the state had a partnership with IBM, TCS and L&T. Then he asked a harder question: "Why can't we make? Is it impossible?" The QShiva systems are the answer for now, he said, built for demonstration. In two years, he said, the makers have promised to produce quantum computers for Amaravati: "We can supply for everybody in India. If necessary, we will export quantum computers."

'The right man'

Naidu traced his own career from his first election as an MLA in 1978 through the economic reforms of 1991, the IT boom and the Vision 2020 plan he drew up as Chief Minister of undivided Andhra Pradesh. He then turned to the Prime Minister.

"Right time, the right place, the right man. That is Narendra Modi. Country is blessed, according to me."

India has become the world's fourth-largest economy, he said. "I am 100% confident by 2047 India will be the number one economy. Nobody can stop it."

'They used to heckle me, 420'

He recalled being mocked when he first pushed information technology, told that nobody needed IT and that cellphones would not put food on the table. "Even sometimes I spoke about Vision 2020, they used to heckle me, 420. I faced all these insults, but I had a conviction."

Today, he said, Indians lead technology companies across the world. He described fighting successive governments in the 1990s to open up telecoms, when international calls had to be booked as "ordinary", "urgent" or "lightning", and cited Skyroot's private rocket launch as proof of what Indians can do. "Indians are capable, but we have to work with consensus."

'Today people are calling me Water Man'

With power, road and digital grids in place, he said, the missing link is a national water grid: Godavari linked to Kaveri, then Ganga to Kaveri. "People call me CEO, IT man. Today people are calling me Water Man. I'm very happy, proud of it."

What he asked of the IITs

Naidu asked the alumni to help build whole ecosystems around the state's space city and drone city. He said a fifth-generation fighter jet will be assembled at Puttaparthi, on a defence and aerospace corridor running to Bengaluru through Hindupur, and that Tirupati is being planned for semiconductors.

"Wherever you are, think of your country for five minutes or ten minutes or one hour," he said. "Our efforts are not to produce billionaires and trillionaires alone. Every citizen should have better living standards."

He also restated his call for larger families as the population ages: "Not one child, have two or three... They are the wealth in future."

Amaravati, 'Cyberabad plus'

He described the new capital as he wants it built: no overhead poles, all utilities in ducts, waterways fed by the Krishna and Godavari, a link to the port at Machilipatnam, half its area green and its energy renewable. Having built Cyberabad in Hyderabad, he called Amaravati "Cyberabad plus". "Tomorrow all of us will see proudly India is having better cities compared to any other city in the world. That will be Amaravati," he said.

He ended with a warning about time. "Twenty years is very, very crucial for India, next twenty years. Even we should not waste one day. If we waste one day, it will be waste forever."

Earlier in the day, IT and education minister Nara Lokesh told the summit that whatever Andhra Pradesh does, the rest of India follows. Read our preview: what the PanIIT Andhra Pradesh Summit set out to do.