Quantum Infrastructure and Access
Quantum runs on infrastructure
A working quantum economy needs machines, and it needs the physical plant around them. Testbeds, the networks that connect them, and facilities built to house hardware most buildings cannot. Access to all of it is what turns a quantum ambition into quantum that works.
For most of the field's short commercial history, access meant renting time on someone else's machine over the cloud. That is changing. McKinsey's Quantum Technology Monitor 2026 finds companies moving past experiments and into practice, building internal teams and upgrading the systems around the hardware. A third of the companies it analyzed now spend more than $10 million a year on quantum, and 7 percent spend over $50 million.¹ As real capability moves in-house, the infrastructure it runs on follows.
Serious buyers have stopped asking about qubit counts. They're asking harder questions now. Can they connect a system to the tools they already use, shape it around their own problems, and hold on to what they learn as they go?
The understanding a team develops working with quantum compounds over time, and stays with them for the work ahead. Access builds the institutional knowledge, the human infrastructure, that a quantum economy runs on.
Own what you must, share what you can
More institutions want their own systems today, and for good reason. But no single organization can stand up everything the field requires. The full stack runs from cryogenics and clean power to secure sites and specialized facilities. Few universities, companies, or labs can build all of it alone, and they shouldn't be expected to.
This is where a region can do the work. Some infrastructure must be owned and close to the people who use it every day. Much of it does not, and duplicating that in every state is slow and expensive. It's the kind of parallel spending that produces the same capability three times and pays for it three times. When regions share infrastructure, the gap closes. A region can share the testbeds, networks, and facilities across all of its institutions. Each one owns what it must and reaches the rest, without building the whole stack alone. Redundancy is for data, not infrastructure.
Built this way, access is not a smaller version of ownership. It is the difference between a region where a handful of institutions can afford to participate and one where many have the opportunity.
Connecting the pieces
Shared infrastructure does not coordinate itself. Someone has to convene the owners and the users, align what gets built where, and keep access open on terms everyone can trust. Left alone, pieces are built in isolation and hit the dead ends our Thesis warned about. They get corrected, but later and at a cost.
This is where Qlocity fits. We act as connective tissue between the institutions that build, the ones that use, and the capital that funds them. We convene meaningful collaboration to turn scattered assets into shared capacity, and we help regions decide what to own together rather than apart.
Access, done right, is infrastructure a region can stand on. Build it for everyone, and the quantum field reaches further. That is how infrastructure scales with quantum rather than behind it.
Quantum Technology Monitor 2026, McKinsey & Company, April 2026. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinseytechnology/our-insights/mckinsey-quantum-technology-monitor-2026-a-commercial-tipping-point