Building or Buying Access to Quantum Computing

Building or Buying Access to Quantum Computing Guest post by Dr. Leandro Aolita, Chief Researcher, Quantum Research Centre, Technology Innovation Institute Whoever fabricates, tests and refines physical qubits now is helping to determine what the standard hardware of the next decade looks like, rather than adopting a standard that already exists. Organizations around the world now have access to quantum computing but almost all of them simply rent time on someone else’s machine, typically through a cloud account with one of a handful of hardware providers. Far fewer have built one from chip design through fabrication to the software layer that turns a physical device into something a researcher can run. The capacity to build it determines whether an institution, or a country, participates in shaping how the technology develops or remains a customer of it. In February 2026, my team at the Technology Innovation Institute’s Quantum Research Centre opened cloud access to superconducting quantum processing units (QPUs), including QPUs we designed and fabricated in-house at our Quantum Computing Hardware Lab in Abu Dhabi. The systems available through the platform range from 5 to 25 qubits. Our newest in-house chips hold their quantum state up to ten times longer than our first-generation prototypes did. A few dozen qubits is certainly small by the standards of the largest global players, but the number is not the interesting part. What matters is that every stage of the chain sits in-house: the physical chip design, the fabrication, the control electronics, and Qibo, the open-source software framework our quantum middleware team built to let a researcher submit a job and run it seamlessly on either a simulator or the physical hardware. That full chain, from design through fabrication to cloud operation, is held by a comparatively short list of organizations worldwide. The software layer is also released as open source. Qibo lets researchers outside TII build quantum circuits and hybrid quantum-classical workflows using the same interface our own team relies on and run them against simulators without needing access to physical hardware at all. Sovereign hardware capability and open scientific infrastructure are rarely discussed in the same breath, but they sit comfortably side by side: building the machine does not mean keeping the code to yourself. Quantum computing is still young enough that nobody knows which physical approach — superconducting circuits, trapped ions, neutral atoms, photonics or something else — will ultimately scale best for which class of problem. An institution with access to hardware but no ability to design or adapt it is dependent on whichever choices its providers happen to make. An institution holding the full stack can adjust its systems as the science moves and shape hardware around problems specific to its own region or industry, rather than waiting for someone else to decide those problems are worth building for. This is part of why a growing number of governments now treat quantum hardware capability as a strategic asset, alongside the more familiar conversation about quantum-safe cryptography. The two are related but distinct. One concerns defending today’s data against tomorrow’s machines; The other asks whether a country or institution can build and adapt the machines at all. None of this means useful, large-scale quantum computers are close. The hardware field remains split between several competing physical approaches, and no one architecture has established a clear lead. What has changed is more basic: the set of institutions capable of building and operating real quantum hardware, however modest in scale, at all, is no longer limited to the handful of companies that dominate the headlines. The next meaningful milestone in quantum computing may not be a new qubit record. It may be a wider map of who can build the machines, not just use them. September 14, 2026 Doug Finke2026-09-14T20:43:41-07:00 Leave A Comment Cancel replyComment Type in the text displayed above Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.