NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- A British startup has installed New York City’s first quantum computer at a data center in Manhattan.
Oxford Quantum Circuits has placed the system at a data center run by Digital Realty Trust in the Google building in Chelsea, billing the technology to customers of the site as a means of running artificial intelligence programs faster and more efficiently. Oxford Quantum Chief Executive Officer Gerald Mullally declined in an interview to provide the exact costs of the computer but estimated that the firm would spend tens of millions of dollars over three to five years, in part to buy Nvidia Corp. chips to integrate into it.
The system’s installation is expected to be announced alongside a number of US-UK partnerships and investments this week while President Donald Trump is visiting Prime Minister Keir Starmer. In turn, Bloomberg reported earlier that the leaders of ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Nvidia are also planning to pledge support for billions of dollars in UK data center investments as part of Trump’s trip.
Investments in the quantum computing space have accelerated in recent months with industry leaders projecting technological breakthroughs sooner than previously expected. Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang in particular has grown noticeably bullish on quantum, saying the technology — which can be expensive and complex to build, but has the potential to dramatically improve processing times — is reaching an inflection point. Just in the past two weeks, Nvidia has backed quantum computing startups PsiQuantum and Quantinuum.
Computers traditionally store information in so-called bits represented as either a one or a zero. Quantum computers use qubits that can be represented as a zero, a one or a mix of both, allowing them to consider many possibilities at once and tackle problems that traditional systems struggle with. But qubits are notoriously fragile and prone to error, with some of the leading technologies requiring supercooled, quiet environments.
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Mullally described the system in Manhattan as “one of the most powerful quantum computers in the world because it is able to run thousands of quantum operations before error takes over.” Some of the world’s largest technology companies have spent years trying to develop so-called fault-tolerant quantum computers. IBM, which has a quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, New York, has a goal of developing a large-scale one by 2029.
Mullally said Oxford Quantum plans to continue to invest in the computer in Manhattan and upgrade it into a more powerful computer by 2028. The company has also installed quantum computers at data centers in Tokyo and Reading, UK.
Deployment of Oxford Quantum’s computer with Nvidia chips is nearing completion, according to the company. Select customers are expected to gain access to the computer this year, with full commercial availability beginning in 2026.