D-Wave Quantum CEO Alan Baratz said Nvidia Jensen Huang is ‘dead wrong’ about quantum computing after comments from the chip giant’s boss spooked Wall Street on Wednesday.
Huang was asked Tuesday about Nvidia’s strategy for quantum computing. He said that Nvidia could make conventional chips that are needed alongside quantum computing chips, but that those computers would need 1 million times the number of quantum processing units, called qubits, that they currently have.
Huang told analysts that getting “very useful quantum computers” to market could take 15 to 30 years.
Huang’s remarks sent stocks in the nascent industry slumping, with D-Wave fall 36% on Wednesday.
“The reason that’s wrong is that we at D-Wave are commercial today,” Baratz told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa on “The Exchange.” Baratz said the companies included MasterCard and Japan’s NTT Docomo “are using our quantum computers today in production to benefit their business operations.”
“Not 30 years from now, not 20 years from now, not 15 years from now,” Baratz said. “But now now.”
D-Wave’s income is still minimal. Sales in the last quarter fell 27% to $1.9 million from $2.6 million a year earlier.
Quantum computing promises to solve problems that are difficult for current processors, such as decoding encryption, generating random numbers and large-scale simulations. Technologists have been working on this for decades, and companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and IBM pursue it today, alongside researchers in startups and universities.
Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corp., speaks while holding a Project Digits computer during the CES 2025 event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. Huang announced a series of new chips , software and services, aiming to stay at the forefront of artificial intelligence computing. Photographer: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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D-Wave was among a number of companies that experienced a resurgence of interest from investors in December, when Google announced a breakthrough in his own research. Google said it had completed a 100 qubit chip, the second of six steps in his strategy to build a quantum system with 1 million qubits.
D-Wave shares rose 178% in December after 185% the month before. Quantum company Throw away the computerwhich fell 45% on Wednesday, quintupled in value last month. IonQ down 39% on Wednesday. The stock rose 14% in December after a 143% rally in November.
Baratz acknowledged that an approach to quantum computing, called gate-based, may be decades away. But he said he uses an annealing approach, which can be implemented now.
While Huang’s “comments may not be totally off-base for gate model quantum computers, well, they are 100% off-base for annealing quantum computers,” Baratz said.
Nvidia declined to comment.
Even after Wednesday’s slide, D-Wave’s shares are up about 600% in the past year, giving the company a market capitalization of $1.6 billion.
Quantum computing has also been boosted by investor interest in artificial intelligence, the technology that has led to growing demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units, which use conventional transistors instead of qubits. Nvidia’s market capitalization has increased by 168% in the past year to $3.4 trillion.
Baratz said D-Wave systems can solve problems beyond the capabilities of faster Nvidia-equipped systems.
“I would be happy to meet Jensen anytime, anywhere, to help fill in those gaps for him,” Baratz said.
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2025-01-08 21:19:00
