Diraq, an Australian silicon spin-qubit startup spun out of University of New South Wales research, opened its first U.S. laboratory on August 19, 2026, inside the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park's On-Ramp Hub in Chicago, hosted at mHUB while IQMP's permanent campus is still under construction. The lab is equipped with two dedicated cryogenic refrigeration units and is already running qubit measurement, cryogenic CMOS testing, and component verification work rather than simply standing up as a satellite office. The technical bet behind Diraq is that qubits built from silicon spin devices can be manufactured using much of the same CMOS fabrication process that already produces conventional logic chips, in contrast to superconducting approaches used by IBM and Google or trapped-ion approaches used by IonQ and Quantinuum, which need bespoke fabrication and control hardware. That manufacturing compatibility is the company's core argument for why silicon spin qubits can scale toward the thousands-of-qubits systems it is targeting by 2029 more cheaply than competing modalities, since it can reuse decades of existing semiconductor fab investment rather than building a parallel supply chain from scratch. The Chicago facility gives Diraq a second time zone of lab capacity alongside its Sydney headquarters, letting cryogenic test rigs run experiments in shifts across roughly 24 hours instead of sitting idle overnight, which matters in a hardware field where qubit calibration and noise-characterization runs are typically the bottleneck on iteration speed. For engineers and researchers tracking quantum hardware roadmaps, this is one more data point in a broader 2026 pattern: several qubit modalities, including silicon spin, superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral atom, and photonic approaches, remain in active competition for which reaches useful fault-tolerant scale first, and manufacturability-focused entrants like Diraq are explicitly positioning fab reuse and cost, rather than raw qubit count today, as their differentiator.