Thank you for the question.
As you said, the Institut quantique de Sherbrooke enjoys significant investments, both federal and provincial. Over the past 10 years, we've developed a vision for developing an ecosystem that allows our students to take great ideas from basic research and create their own businesses. This has led to the emergence of several startups in the quantum field in Sherbrooke.
With support from the Quebec government, this eventually led to the establishment of a quantum sciences Innovation Zone. You alluded to that earlier. We're talking about a major investment of over $200 million here, to support these startups and attract businesses from outside, many of which have already begun to set up shop in Sherbrooke.
In our city, as in most places in the country that are home to major centres in the quantum field, our number one export used to be talent. We used to train people who then went to work abroad for the big guys like Google, IBM and so on. But thanks to the efforts we made over the past few years, we're now able to keep that talent in Sherbrooke. We invest in training these individuals and we can benefit from their know-how during the productive years of their career.
As I said in my remarks, it was really the stable, long-term, flexible funding that allowed us to develop this vision and move nimbly toward this idea.