Nvidia's Jensen Huang says quantum computing nears key breakthrough

By Lynn Doan

 

Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said Wednesday that quantum computing is reaching an inflection point and will be powerful enough in the coming years to help “solve some interesting problems” globally.  

Quantum computing, which technology companies have been developing for decades, is set to take off with systems rapidly becoming “more robust, higher performance and more resilient,” Huang said during a keynote speech at a company event being held jointly with the VivaTech 2025 conference in Paris.  

The quantum-computing industry aims to use the unique properties of subatomic particles to process data much faster than traditional semiconductor-based electronics. The technical difficulties and high costs of building practical systems have meant that the field has been stuck in an experimental stage. Companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have been trying find practical uses for quantum systems. 

Shares of companies developing quantum technology rose in premarket trading on Huang’s comments. US-listed D-Wave Quantum Inc. rose about 2per cent and IonQ Inc. increased 3.6per cent. Rigetti Computing Inc. was up 4.5per cent and Quantum Computing Inc. gained 8.4per cent before New York exchanges opened.  

Nvidia’s chips will be used to support quantum computing and the company’s entire quantum algorithm stack will be available and accelerated on its Grace Blackwell 200 chip, Huang said. Quantum computers have the potential to vastly accelerate the operating speed of large language models and create more powerful AI. 

Huang’s forecast marks a change in tone from January, when he said that “very useful” quantum computers, which are still largely used by researchers, were likely still decades away. 

 

Quantum computers can process information and solve problems much quicker than classical computers because they can make calculations in parallel rather than sequentially. Traditional computers process information in bits — which have only two possible states, 0 or 1, and must be assigned a value before the machine moves on to the next piece of information.  Meanwhile, a quantum computer’s qubits can hold a “superposition,” where they aren’t assigned a value until the computer is finished with the entire calculation and work together instead of operating independently.  

“Just like Moore’s Law, I could totally expect 10 times more logical qubits every five years, 100 times more logical qubits every 10 years,” Huang said.