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✍🏽 Welcome to Landon’s Loop: your weekly read on Chicago startups!
In this week’s newsletter #114:
- Why Illinois is home to the world’s most powerful AI system
- Highlights from my Gen Z Roundtable with Comptroller Susana Mendoza
- 5 tech events happening this week in Chicago
🔙 Highlights from Last Week
We posted our official TechChicago Week schedule.
Three events at our office: Powering AI in the Heartland, The AI Agents in Healthcare Symposium, and Pre-Seed Between the Coasts. Watch our announcement video below 👇🏽
TechChicago Week ‘25 is right around the corner and this year we’re hosting three events at @drivecapital:
☢️ Powering AI in the Heartland
🧬 AI Agents in Healthcare Symposium
🌱 Pre-Seed Between the Coasts
Founders, VCs, and top speakers.
— #Landon (#@landon20s)
12:49 PM • Jun 16, 2025
I hosted the Gen Z Roundtable with Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, where we learned about her passion for using technology to drive efficiency in government.
Under her leadership, Illinois has earned nine credit upgrades, grown our rainy day fund from just $48,000 to $2.3B, and delivered the fastest vendor payment cycle in decades 👇🏽
We co-hosted another successful Data Night @ Drive with our friends at UChicago’s Data Science Institute.
At this one, we welcomed Sonja Petrović, the Co-Founder & CSO of TrustVector, for a talk on ethical AI 👇🏽
His Substack is called “The Last Ward” and it’s one of my favorite hyper-niche sources of constructive optimism about Chicago 👇🏽
🖥️ Illinois Quietly Built the World's Fastest Supercomputer
Last week I had a chance to visit THE Aurora Supercomputer at Argonne National Lab and it completely reframed how I think about infrastructure.
Aurora is the world’s fastest AI supercomputer and it’s massive in every sense. It runs on 63,744 Intel GPUs and 21,248 CPUs, spans the space of four tennis courts, and processes data so fast that it can solve in 1 second what would take the entire population of Earth 40 years to calculate manually.
It’s a system built for real scientific work: training AI models, simulating fusion reactors, mapping new materials, and accelerating drug discovery.
In 8 minutes, Aurora can store enough characters to stack books to the moon. It’s cooled by 44,000 gallons of water, and uses 300 miles of fiber optic cable just to move data across its system.
Why Should Startups Care
A large chunk of my newsletter audience (you) are Chicago-based startup founders and operators, so I always like to ask: why should startups care?
Especially Chicago startups. Argonne is 30 miles from our city.
Founders should care because compute is the next frontier. It’s not just about the models anymore. It’s about who controls the infrastructure that makes them possible.
And Illinois is starting to look like an outlier:
Meta signed a 20-year deal with a nuclear plant here to power its AI training.
CME Group and Google are building a $350M data center in Aurora.
Our state is leaning in hard with investments in semiconductors, quantum, and clean energy.
We have cheap power, water, and a talent pipeline from some of the country’s best research labs and universities. Aurora is the headline, but the story is bigger: Illinois is quietly becoming a backbone for the future of AI.
Founders who get this early will have an unfair advantage.
📊 Chart of the Week
Chicago has the second-highest number of manufacturing jobs in the country and the most manufacturing space out of all major cities.
From aerospace to food processing, we support a unique range of manufacturing sectors. We need to do everything in our power to encourage more manufacturers look to Chicago.
💰 A Banking Partner for the Builder Journey
Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank, is the bank of innovative companies and investors.
With 40+ years of dedication to our sector, SVB has deep experience banking investors and innovation clients.
Their entire business, from solutions and technology to credit policy and beyond, is purpose-built for high-growth companies and investors and delivered at the speed they need.
If you're interested in learning more about SVB - Book a Meeting with Chicago’s own Nick Jones today
📆 Events Around the City This Week
AI Tinkerers #19 ft Comet
Hosted by Drive Capital and Comet
Comet is a model evaluation platform featuring LLM evaluation, experiment tracking and model monitoring.
Check out their new product Opik, an end-to-end evaluation platform
Tuesday
Health2Tech Chicago
Tuesday
GenAI Collective Chicago: The Future of Work
Tuesday
Eureka Book Launch Happy Hour
Tuesday
Chicago API Security Summit 2025
Wednesday
🗞 Previous Newsletters:
👋 See you next week!
The 10 best dinners in Chicago (no particular order)
- Virtue
- Shaws
- Lao Peng You
- Green Street Meat
- Ciccio Mio
- Saigon Sisters
- Giant
- Girl & the Goat
- Kasama
- Qing Xiang Yuan— #Landon (#@landon20s)
2:02 PM • Jun 19, 2025
Now for the 10 best breakfast spots in Chicago:
- Kasama
- Manny’s
- Eleven City diner
- Mike’s place
- Schneider’s Deli
- Café Con Leche
- Trivoli
- Dove’s Luncheonette
- m.henry
- Honeybear— #Landon (#@landon20s)
2:15 PM • Jun 22, 2025
