Nvidia Invests In Quantum Computing Weeks After CEO Said It's Decades From Being Useful

GTC Nvidia is investing in a research center to advance quantum computing development, just weeks after its head honcho torpedoed the share price of quantum firms by declaring the tech is decades away from being useful.

The California-based GPU biz announced at its GTC 2025 event in San Jose that it is building a research center on the opposite coast in Boston to develop cutting-edge technologies aimed at advancing quantum computing.

Named the Nvidia Accelerated Quantum Research Center (NVAQC), it will focus on combining quantum tech with the company's AI hardware to develop what it calls "accelerated quantum supercomputers" capable of solving some of the world's toughest problems.

We asked Nvidia how much it is investing in this venture, and it declined to add anything beyond the details in its announcement. The GPU giant is not short of spare change, having reported 2025 net income of $72.88 billion last month, up 145 percent year-on-year.

Nevertheless, the AI chips maker can't be expecting to see a return on its quantum investment in the near future: CEO Jensen Huang famously remarked that practical quantum systems are likely still 20 years away.

Speaking at a financial analyst session at the CES show in January, Huang claimed the industry is probably five to six orders of magnitude away from the number of qubits needed to make practical quantum computers.

"If you said 15 years for very useful quantum computers that would probably be on the early side," he said. "If you said 30, it's probably on the late side. If you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it."

Several of the most prominent quantum computing specialists saw their share price plunge 50 percent following the remarks.

Now Nvidia is teaming up with Quantinuum, Quantum Machines, and QuEra Computing as part of its NVAQC project, along with researchers from academia, including the Harvard Quantum Initiative in Science and Engineering (HQI) and the Engineering Quantum Systems (EQuS) group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The center will deploy an "AI supercomputer" built around Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems and Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking, incorporating 576 Blackwell GPUs.

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This hardware will be used for complex simulations of quantum systems and to develop low-latency hardware control algorithms essential for error correction, along with hybrid AI-quantum applications using Nvidia's DGX Quantum hardware and CUDA-Q development platform.

Integrating quantum with conventional systems remains a major challenge. The decoding required for error correction can only function if data from millions of qubits can be transferred between quantum and classical hardware at ultralow latencies.

Nvidia indicated that some of the work with Quantum Machines at the NVAQC will be on developing high-bandwidth interfaces for its GB200 superchips.

Mikhail Lukin, a Professor at Harvard and co-director of HQI, said of the GPU giant's investment in the quantum research facility:

"The accelerated quantum and classical computing technologies Nvidia is bringing together has the potential to advance the research in areas ranging from quantum error correction to applications of quantum computing systems, accelerating quantum computing research and pulling useful quantum computing closer to reality."

Nvidia expects the NVAQC to begin operations later this year. ®

Updated to add on March 20

Funnily enough, at a quantum computing-themed day during GTC this week, Huang somewhat backed down from his stance in January, saying of his Thursday on-stage panel session: "This is the first event in history where a company CEO invites all of the guests to explain why he was wrong."