‘Quantum Computing Still At Least Two Decades Away’: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says quantum computing is still at least two decades away. He said before a useful quantum computer can be brought to life it is important to focus on the pre-quantum level.

Addressing BW Businessworld’s question on quantum computing’s current status, Huang said that the technology is realistically two to three decades away and companies need to make efforts toward building at a pre-quantum level.

“The most powerful computer today is based on NVIDIA GPUs and it is sensible that we create a pre-quantum computer that researchers could use to develop their science”, he said.

Quantum computing technology is being hotly pursued due to its potential for solving highly complex problems that are beyond the reach of classical computers.

“We have a journey that’s at least a couple of decades away. But we are addressing a difficult problem and an important challenge”, he added.

At the NVIDIA GTC 2022, Huang touched upon various developments on NVIDIA’s end in the area of quantum computing. During his keynote, he said, “The global community requires a super-fast pre-quantum computer that produces known good results.”

Elucidating on NVIDIA cuQuantum (the company’s SDK build for quantum circuit simulation), he said, “Through cuQuantum, a 32 DGX POD can simulate a 40-qubits quantum computer.”

cuQuantum is currently being adopted by many organisations globally including Google, Oracle, AWS, BMW, IBM and even startups and supercomputing centres.    

AWS has leveraged the capabilities of NVIDIA cuQuantum in its Bracket quantum computing service. By doing so the company has seen a 900-times speedup and 3.5x reduction in cost. Meanwhile, Oracle is building a quantum simulation virtual machine for the OCI cloud through NVIDIA cuQuantum.

“When quantum computing arrives, it will likely be an extension of classical accelerated computing”, Huang said during the GTC keynote.

cuQuantum coupled with NVIDIA QODA (platform for hybrid quantum-classical computing) running on DGX can emulate a quantum accelerated computer.

Speaking on the larger picture to BW Businessworld, Huang said, “We’re largely focused on helping the world build a hybrid quantum accelerated computer that allows us to get ready for the future algorithms.”

“When quantum computer comes, there will be CPUs, GPUs and QPUs (Quantum Processing Units). All of these processors will work together to solve the appropriate parts of the algorithm to ultimately solve problems that are impossible today”, he concluded.

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