  We describe a quantum circuit that produces a highly entangled state of N
qubits from which one can efficiently compute expectation values of local
observables. This construction yields a variational ansatz for quantum
many-body states that can be regarded as a generalization of the multi-scale
entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA), and to which we refer as the
branching MERA. In a lattice system in D dimensions, the scaling of
entanglement of a region of size L^D in the branching MERA is not subject to
restrictions such as a boundary law L^{D-1}, but can be proportional to the
size of the region, as we demonstrate numerically for D=1,2 dimensions.
