Nvidia plots Quantum Day at GTC 2025 – for tech it called a distant dream

A week after Nvidia chief Jensen Huang demolished the market valuations of listed quantum computing brands by saying the technology is 20 years away from being useful, the GPU maker has confirmed it is hosting a quantum computing day.

Speaking at the CES technology trade show, Nvidia's rock star CEO claimed quantum systems are probably five to six orders of magnitude short of the number of qubits needed to make them practical. He speculated it would take more than 15 years and probably more like 20 years to fix this.

In response, the share prices of quantum businesses such as Rigetti, D-Wave, and IonQ slumped by nearly 50 percent when they weren't exactly riding high to begin with.

Yet this week, Nvidia announced it will be holding a Quantum Day at its own GTC 2025 conference in March, describing quantum computing as "one of the most exciting areas in computer science, promising progress in accelerated computing beyond what's considered possible today."

Never one to be outdone in the marketing hype stakes, Microsoft also proclaimed 2025 as "the year to become quantum ready," claiming the industry is on the cusp of an era of reliable quantum computing, making this "a critical and catalyzing time for business leaders to act."

The issue with current systems is that the quantum bits – qubits – they are based on are generally too susceptible to environmental noise and prone to errors, making them largely impractical for real-world applications. They also need many more qubits than exisitng quantum processors, though many companies are working to scale up.

This isn't stopping Microsoft from peddling its Quantum Ready program, through which it aims to provide businesses with the insight and tools to build hybrid applications and invest in skills and access to reliable quantum systems.

The grievance leveled at proponents of quantum is that they have talked up the technology for decades and swallowed investment dollars, yet practical applications seem as far off as ever, as Huang articulated.

Those in the quantum industry were quick to hit back last week. D-Wave CEO Dr Alan Baratz told The Register that Huang's remarks were "just the latest in a string of misinformation" driving a negative market reaction to quantum computing, and claimed the Nvidia CEO has a misunderstanding of quantum tech.

D-Wave built its business around a type of processing called quantum annealing, which is handy for solving some optimization problems. However, D-Wave has also begun work on its own version of the quantum gate technology favored by most other companies in the field.

IonQ chairman and CEO Peter Chapman also defended quantum technology:

"Today's classical computing hardware is limited by computational capacity and power requirements in ways that will likely prohibit society from ever being able to solve some of its most pressing problems," he said.

Chapman believes his company will eventually be profitable, predicting sales approaching $1 billion by 2030. However, during IonQ's last set of results - for the nine months ended September 2024 - the business reported revenue of $31.4 million and a net loss of $130 million.

Another proponent, Quantum Circuits, reckons Nvidia's decision to host an event validates the advice to organizations to start planning their quantum strategies now rather than waiting years.

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"It's time for enterprises to explore how quantum applications can drive their businesses. We're making great progress, and we expect significant advances in 2025," claimed CEO Ray Smets.

This echoes sentiment from cloud biz OVH, whose former CTO, Thierry Souche, once told us in an interview that businesses should be prepared to invest to build quantum skills in the workforce sooner rather than later.

Heather West, research manager for Quantum Computing, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms, and Technology at IDC, told The Register that quantum computing is still a nascent technology.

"Most systems under development are digital gate-based models, which are the most difficult to build. These are the systems that currently cannot be used for any real-world applications, which I believe Jensen was referring to in his original comment. For these systems to be useful, they will need to scale to a large number of high-quality qubits that will be used for quantum computation and error correction," she noted.

"Some quantum hardware vendors predict that this feat will be accomplished in the next five to seven years. As the technology advances and the systems can be used to solve problems of value, we can expect customer spend to increase as well."

Quantum annealers and neutral atom systems use the quantum properties of qubits differently, and enterprises can already operate these systems to solve real-world optimization problems, she noted.

In response to Huang's remark that practical quantum computing is 20 years away, Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Charlie Dai told us that it depends how you define "practical" and "quantum computing."

"On one hand, commercial quantum computing is already making an impact in niche markets, mostly in the quantum annealing domain. On the other hand, universal quantum computing has been facing a range of critical challenges since day one, such as error correction for fault tolerance, gate fidelity and switching speed, qubit connectivity, coherence time, and infrastructure scalability," Dai said.

"Scientists and vendors are making promising progress, but universal quantum computing for broad commercial adoption may still be some years away, as Jensen mentioned." ®