Why D-Wave Quantum’s CEO was “quite disappointed” with Nvidia’s Quantum Day

Back in January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a bit of an oopsie. His comments that quantum computers were 15 to 30 years away from being “useful” sparked a massive sell-off in pure-play quantum computing stocks.

To try to make amends with the industry, Nvidia announced that it would be hosting a Quantum Day to discuss the industry’s progress, which was part of last week’s GTC.

There, Huang made another oopsie by revealing that when he made those remarks about quantum computing in January, he didn’t even think any of these firms were publicly traded. That’s despite Nvidia partnering with many of these firms on different projects.

We recently interviewed D-Wave Quantum CEO Dr. Alan Baratz, who runs a very real publicly traded quantum computing company, and asked him for his thoughts on how the event went.

His response:

“I was quite disappointed in how the panel that I was involved in went. I think that it was quite self-serving for Nvidia. I expected that, but I expected it to be a bit more thoughtful and respectful. I was surprised when Jensen said, ‘I didn’t even know there were public quantum companies.’ Seriously?

I was disappointed when he said, well, maybe quantum computers aren’t really computers, they’re just scientific instruments. Well, OK, if that’s true, why are we computing the solutions to problems that can’t be computed on your GPUs? I mean, I thought that comment was very kind of derogatory toward the quantum industry and self-serving for Nvidia. And so I just felt that the whole tone and tenor was dismissive of quantum computing and the quantum industry. And that was disappointing to me.”

In San Jose, Nvidia also announced that it would be building an accelerated quantum computing research center in Boston “in collaboration with leading hardware and software makers.”

D-Wave has not been invited to be part of that consortium. That doesn’t bother Baratz too much, though, since he expects the company will be ahead of the curve in pulling off what the chip designer is looking to accomplish, as D-Wave aims to integrate its Advantage quantum computer with a supercomputer in Germany in the near future.

From Baratz:

“We were not approached and yes, it was a mistake. But I’m not too concerned about it because frankly, we’ll probably be up and running with that integration capability at the Julich Supercomputing Center well before it will be up and running in Boston.

I mean, think about it, you know, Jensen is going to provide GPUs for quantum-GPU integration. That’s what we’re doing at Julich with 25,000 GPUs! That will be up and running in months. So no, we were not approached; yes, I think it was a mistake that we are not approached, because we’re quite unique in the quantum industry and I would think that if Nvidia was really interested in understanding how quantum and GPUs relate to one another, you would be interested in doing it with more than just one form of quantum computing. 

But we’re already marching down that path. We’re just doing it at a different facility.”