Conciliatory comments by Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang towards the quantum computing industry only made things worse as industry players plunged by double-digit percentages during the chipmaker’s Quantum Day event.
Earlier this year Huang said quantum computing technology would not be viable for another 20 years sending the once high-flying sector into a tailspin. Executives from a dozen quantum computing companies, including Rigetti Computing (RGTI), D-Wave Quantum (QBTS), and IonQ (IONQ), participated in yesterday’s panel discussion where Huang said he wanted them “to explain why he was wrong.”
Although Nvidia announced earlier this week it was building a research center to advance quantum computing, Huang’s commentary at the GTC developers conference may have only made things worse. Quantum computing stocks are still tumbling in premarket trading this morning.
Huang noted he was surprised when he had heard about the stock meltdown caused by his comments at CES 2025 in January. “My first reaction was, ‘How could they be public? How could a quantum computer company be public?’”
That’s not much of an olive branch being extended to question why these early-stage companies are even in the public markets at this point. He compared their current pre-revenue status to Nvidia’s early days, and noted it took Nvidia over 20 years to build out its software and hardware business. It didn’t sound like he was walking back his earlier comments very far.
Rigetti Computing fell 9% yesterday and is down another 3% in early morning trading. D-Wave Quantum plunged 18% and is down this morning 4.6%. Quantum Computing and IonQ were down 12% and 9% yesterday, respectively, and are down another 10% and 1%, respectively, today.
Huang said quantum computing companies might want to rebrand themselves as scientific instruments, rather than as computers. However, D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz challenged that its technology was merely an instrument as “there are computational problems that are out of the range of classical" computers.
However, no quantum computer has yet to outperform a computer at solving a real-world problem.
