Aerospace defense contractor Lockheed Martin just entered into a “multi-year contract” with D-Wave Systems, Inc. to purchase the world’s first commercially available quantum computer. Here’s a blurb from the official press release:

Lockheed Martin and D-Wave will collaborate to realize the benefits of a computing platform based upon a quantum annealing processor, as applied to some of Lockheed Martin’s most challenging computation problems. The multi-year contract includes a system, maintenance and associated professional services.

This is both fascinating and terrifying news. Imagine what could be done with this hardware.