Amaravati : The Abode of Immortals Wants to Build a Quantum Future

ON THE BANKS OF THE KRISHNA RIVER, ANDHRA PRADESH CHIEF MINISTER N. CHANDRABABU NAIDU IS ERECTING A CITY FROM SCRATCH — AND BETTING THAT QUANTUM COMPUTING WILL DO FOR AMARAVATI WHAT SOFTWARE ONCE DID FOR SILICON VALLEY.

There is something almost mythological about Amaravati's ambition. The name itself means “the abode of  immortals”  - the celestial capital of Swarga in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain cosmology. For centuries, the town on the right bank of the Krishna River in Guntur district was famous mainly for a crumbling Buddhist stupa and the memory of the Satavahana Empire. Today, it is the site of what may be the most audacious urban construction project in contemporary India: a greenfield capital city being built from farmland, marshes, and political will, funded by multilateral banks, willed into existence by one of the country's most technology-obsessed politicians, and now anchored by an ambition that reaches into the sub-atomic.

On April 14, 2026 — World Quantum Day — Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu inaugurated the Amaravati Quantum Reference Facility (AQRF) at SRM University-AP. The facility, housing two systems designated Amaravati 1S and Amaravati 1Q, became India's first indigenous open-access quantum computing platform. It was not merely a ribbon-cutting. It was the opening shot in a campaign to plant a sovereign quantum industry on the same soil where farmers gave up their land a decade ago to build a capital.

A FACILITY UNLIKE ANY OTHER

The AQRF is not another imported quantum computer humming inside a cryogenic chamber that only PhDs with vendor clearances can approach. That is precisely the point. Most quantum systems available to researchers globally operate as what Naidu's team describes as “closed black boxes” — expensive, opaque, and accessible only through cloud interfaces that reveal little about the underlying hardware. The AQRF is designed to be the opposite: a fully instrumented platform where researchers, startups, and students can directly access, observe, and experiment with components including processors, cryogenic systems, amplifiers, and control electronics — operating at temperatures near minus 273 degrees Celsius to activate qubits.

More significantly, the facility was assembled almost entirely within India. Approximately 85 per cent of its components were  manufactured  domestically,  making it the first full-stack quantum system built on a predominantly indigenous supply chain in the country.  The  development was structured as a collaborative effort involving seven institutions under the Amaravati Quantum Valley initiative. The Amaravati 1S facility at SRM University serves research functions; the Amaravati 1Q at Medha Towers, Gannavaram, is oriented toward industrial applications. Notably, the quantum reference facilities took shape in just eight months — a timeline that has drawn attention from national observers accustomed to longer gestation on deep-tech infrastructure.

C.V. Sridhar, Mission Director of the AP State Quantum Mission, called the AQRF “a launchpad that will drive India to be one of the top five global hubs for quantum research.” Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Secretary to the Government of India  in the Department of Science and Technology, went further at the inauguration — the AQRF is not merely  infrastructure,  he said, but the backbone of a framework that positions India as a true leader in quantum technologies. The message he wanted to deliver: India is not merely participating in the global quantum race, but shaping it.

Naidu framed the AQRF in terms that will resonate with every engineer who ever struggled to access real quantum hardware. “India has always had the talent and ambition,” he said at the inauguration. “But lacked access to real quantum hardware. With the Amaravati Quantum Reference Facility, that gap is now decisively bridged.”

THE VALLEY BEHIND THE FACILITY

The AQRF is the most concrete output so far of a broader initiative that Naidu has been building toward for over a year: the Amaravati Quantum Valley. The project has all the hallmarks of how Naidu thinks about technology —  large  in  vision,  structured in execution, and backed by institutional commitments rather than announcements alone.

The AP State Quantum Mission (APSQM), constituted as the apex body for planning, coordination, and execution of quantum programs in the state, is the administrative spine of the effort. Beneath it sits the Amaravati Quantum Computing Centre (AQCC), incorporated as a wholly owned government company under the Companies Act, and tasked with being the anchor institution of the Quantum Valley. The state has allocated 50 acres of land in Amaravati for the Valley's Phase I campus, with the Detailed Project Report already approved by APCRDA.

The Valley is designed across four quantum technology domains: quantum computing, quantum communication, quantum sensing and metrology, and quantum materials and devices. Crucially, the state is not placing a single bet on one hardware architecture. The plan articulates four parallel development paths — neutral  atom  systems,  trapped- ion machines, photonic computers, and topological quantum computers — reflecting an awareness that the field remains in contest.

The funding envelope is substantial. The APSQM has an estimated investment target of Rs 4,000 crore over five years, with Phase I (2025–2027) focused on infrastructure, education, and research pilots. Planned shared facilities include cryogenic bays and optics laboratories designed to lower the entry barrier for startups and academic researchers.

The anchor partnership is  with  IBM and Tata Consultancy Services, announced in May 2025. IBM and the Government of Andhra Pradesh entered into discussions to install an IBM Quantum System Two with a 156-qubit Heron processor at the Quantum Valley Tech Park — which, once installed, would make it the most powerful quantum computer in India. TCS is partnering with IBM to develop algorithms and applications and to extend cloud access to IBM's quantum systems to scientists and technologists  in the region. L&T is expected to handle infrastructure build-out. The overall investment target for the Quantum Valley, including private participation, is $1 billion.

The Amaravati Quantum Valley Declaration, signed in June 2025 following a stakeholder workshop in Vijayawada, commits signatories to creating India's largest open quantum testbed — QChipIN — within twelve months, integrating quantum computers, QKD fibre links, and sensor platforms to enable pilots across health-tech, banking and financial services, logistics, defence, and space.

THE SILICON VALLEY ANALOGY — AND ITS LIMITS

Naidu has explicitly invoked Silicon Valley as his reference point. In a December 2025 address to more than 50,000 students delivered as a structured lecture — reportedly the first time a serving chief minister personally delivered a quantum technology lecture in India — he said: “Just as  the digital age is anchored in Silicon Valley, the knowledge economy of the future will be anchored in Amaravati's Quantum Valley.” He also reiterated a pledge originally made at the 2017 Indian Science Congress in Tirupati: a Rs 100-crore award for the first Nobel laureate in quantum science from Andhra Pradesh.

“Twenty-five years ago, I presented a vision for IT. Today, I am presenting a vision for quantum. Just like Silicon Valley anchored the digital age, Amaravati's Quantum Valley will anchor the knowledge economy of the future,” he told students in December.

That continuity — from HITEC City to Quantum Valley — is the political and economic logic Naidu is betting on. The AQRF's 85 per cent domestic supply chain is meant to demonstrate that the bet has already cleared its first hurdle.

DESIGNED FOR THE NEXT CENTURY

What distinguishes Amaravati from most Indian capital cities is  that  it  has been designed from first principles, rather than grown organically around existing infrastructure. The Master Plan was prepared by the Government of Singapore through M/s Surbana  Jurong — one of Asia's most respected urban planning firms — in coordination with APCRDA. The Final Master Plan was notified in February 2016 following extensive public consultations.

The plan's guiding principles are livability, innovation, sustainability, heritage, connectivity, and inclusivity. Every township in the city — 27 in total across nine themed precincts — is designed around a 5-10- 15 rule: five minutes to emergency services, ten minutes to recreational facilities, fifteen minutes to work. Each township covers 400 hectares and houses between 100,000 and 160,000 residents. By 2050, the city is projected to support a population of 3.5 million, generate a GDP of $35 billion, and create 1.5 million jobs.

The nine themed cities within Amaravati are among the most distinctive aspects of the master plan: Government City, Finance City, Justice City, Knowledge City, Health City, Electronics City, Media City, Sports City, and Tourism City — each a self- contained economic zone with its own anchor institutions and infrastructure.

The city sits outside the cyclone zone, is upstream of the Prakasam Barrage on a well- defined stretch of the Krishna River with bund capacity for 12 lakh cusecs of flood discharge, and registers low-to-moderate seismic risk. These are not incidental details for a city designed to last a century. They are the foundations of a resilience argument.

NAIDU'S OPERATING LOGIC

Naidu is, in several respects, a singular figure in Indian state politics when it comes to technology. He was among the first chief ministers to understand, in the mid-1990s, that software services could be a primary engine of economic development rather than a niche sector. He backed HITEC City when it was ridiculed as a vanity project. He attracted investment from companies that had not yet considered India seriously. He is now running the same playbook — this time with quantum technology instead of COBO.

His operating logic is recognisable across every initiative in Amaravati: identify a technology before it achieves mainstream adoption, build the infrastructure ahead of demand, use state capacity to de-risk private investment, and signal ambition loudly enough that talent follows. The Nobel prize pledge is a signal of exactly this kind. Whether or not a quantum Nobel laureate ever claims the Rs 100 crore, the offer communicates seriousness to the research community in a language it understands.
The AQRF's open-access model reflects the same thinking applied to infrastructure. By making hardware visible and accessible — to students, to startups, to researchers who cannot afford proprietary systems — the state is trying to compress the talent development cycle.

THE BIGGER WAGER

Amaravati sits on land where approximately 29,000 farmers traded 35,000 acres of farmland for a promise. The promise was a world-class city. For years, it seemed broken. What is being built now — in the construction zones, in the cryogenic chambers at SRM University, in the IBM discussions and the TCS agreements and the multilateral loan covenants, in the nine themed cities planned on the banks of the Krishna — is an attempt to honour it. The city's name, after all, means the abode of immortals. That is a heavy mythology to carry. But Chandrababu Naidu has never been averse to an ambitious metaphor.