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.
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.
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.
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.