Amaravati is betting on quantum tech. Can it build India’s next Silicon Valley?

It is a vast barren land where earthmovers are crawling in deep foundation pits, iron poles are poking out of construction sites and welders in hard hats are hunched over at work. There couldn’t have been a more unlikely place to dream up the next frontier of technology. But in Amaravati, the newly anointed, under-construction capital city of Andhra Pradesh, over a hundred people are working on quantum computing—an emerging, experimental technology that is far more powerful than traditional computing and can enable extraordinary advancements in fields like drug discovery and artificial intelligence.
Amaravati’s ambitious project is a technology park called Quantum Valley—recalling and going one-up in ambition on the storied Silicon Valley in US. It is, like the rest of the place, still a dust bowl. However, startup companies, scientists and engineers have already started to move in on the edges of Amaravati to work in companies that will be part of the Valley.