IBM has announced the opening of its IBM Quantum Computation Center in Poughkeepsie, which will support a community of more than 150,000 registered users and nearly 80 commercial clients, academic institutions and research laboratories.

According to the Armonk-based company, the new center is home to 10 quantum computing systems. IBM expects to grow its commercially available quantum fleet to 14 systems within the coming month, including a new 53-qubit quantum computer that is being promoted as the largest universal quantum system to be made available for external access.

“Our strategy, since we put the very first quantum computer on the cloud in 2016, was to move quantum computing beyond isolated lab experiments conducted by a handful of organizations, into the hands of tens of thousands of users,” said Dario Gil, director of IBM Research.

“In order to empower an emerging quantum community of educators, researchers, and software developers that share a passion for revolutionizing computing, we have built multiple generations of quantum processor platforms that we integrate into high-availability quantum systems. We iterate and improve the performance of our systems multiple times per year and this new 53-qubit system now incorporates the next family of processors on our roadmap.”