Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has stepped back from his prediction that practical quantum computing applications are decades away following comments that sent stocks spiraling in January.
At Nvidia GTC’s "Quantum Day" event, Huang took a conciliatory tone to the quantum industry, comparing quantum to the GPUs made by Nvidia, noting the latter took plenty of time to make an impact.
"This is the first event in history where a company CEO invites all of the guests to explain why he was wrong," Huang said, according to CNBC, while opening an event that had a dozen representatives from across the quantum industry.
"This whole session is going to be like a therapy session for me,” Huang added.
Huang further backtracked on his comments in January when he said real-world quantum applications were much further off than many industry stakeholders believed.
At the time, the Nvidia chief executive suggested the technology would only be good at solving specific, theoretical problems.
"Of course, quantum computing has the potential and all of our hopes that it will deliver extraordinary impact," Huang reportedly said. "But the technology is insanely complicated."
Referencing the subsequent stock sell off, Huang admitted he didn't know so many quantum firms were already publicly traded.
"How could a quantum computer be public," he said.
Huang also asked the panel if ‘quantum computers’ was the wrong terminology, suggesting they should be referred to as scientific machines instead.
But D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz disputed that, saying his company's computers are already being applied for actual computing, beyond mere measurement.
"There are computational problems that are of the rage of classical computers," Bratz said, according to Investors Business Daily.
Quantum collaboration
Earlier this week, Nvidia announced it was building a research center to develop and provide technologies to help push forward quantum computing.
The Nvidia Accelerated Quantum Research Center (NVAQC) will bring together quantum hardware with existing AI supercomputing, what Nvidia is calling accelerated quantum supercomputing.
"The NVAQC will help solve quantum computing’s most challenging problems, ranging from qubit noise to transforming experimental quantum processors into practical devices,” the company said in a statement.
The NVAQC will be based in Boston in the US and expected to begin work next year. The center will work with industry and academia, offering access to Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems, which the company claimed was the "most powerful hardware ever deployed for quantum computing applications".
"Quantum computing will augment AI supercomputers to tackle some of the world’s most important problems, from drug discovery to materials development," Huang said in a statement.
"Working with the wider quantum research community to advance CUDA-quantum hybrid computing, the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center is where breakthroughs will be made to create large-scale, useful, accelerated quantum supercomputers."
Jensen Huang's quantum error
Such an announcement strikes a different tone to what Huang was saying earlier this year. In January, Huang tanked quantum stocks by saying he didn't buy predictions that the technology would have a real commercial impact any time soon, adding that real-world applications were likely decades away.
“So if you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that’d probably be on the early side. If you said 30 is probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it,” he said at the time.
Quantum Computing Inc shares slipped by 45%, Rigetti Computing by 46% and IonQ by 42% — the total cost of Huang's comments was $4bn in market capitalisation.
That sparked pushback from industry giants including Google, which a few weeks later said it believed commercial quantum computing could arrive within the next five years.
Shortly after that, Microsoft unveiled a quantum chip breakthrough called Majorana 1, saying it could hasten progress towards practical applications.
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