Whether quantum computers will be useful in the near future is a debated topic—and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just had a thought.
“If you said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that would probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it’s probably on the late side. But if you pick 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it,” Huang said during a Q&A with analysts.
If he’s right, that means we won’t see effective quantum computers until 2045.
This month, Huang also hinted at more AI plans, revealed the expected RTX 50 Series GPUs, and announced a small desktop computer known as Project DIGITS with its own Blackwell GPU inside and a starting price of 3,000 dollars. Shares of Nvidia are up over 160% in the past year, largely due to continued AI hype. Last day, quantum firms D-Wave and IonQ saw their respective share prices drop more than 35%.
The field of quantum computing has not received as much hype as generative AI and the tech giants promoting it in recent years. Right now, part of the reason quantum computers aren’t that useful is because of their error rate. Nord Quantique CEO Julien Lemyre previously told PCMag that quantum error correction is the future of the field, and his firm is working on a solution. Errors in qubits, the basic unit of information in a quantum machine, currently render quantum computers largely useless. It’s a crucial hurdle to overcome – but we currently don’t know if or when quantum errors will be eliminated.
Chris Erven, CEO and co-founder of Kets Quantum, believes that quantum computers will eventually pose a significant threat to cybersecurity. “China is making some of the biggest investments in quantum computing, pumping billions of dollars into research and development in hopes of being the first to create a large-scale, cryptographically significant machine,” Erven told PCMag in a statement. “Although they may be years away from being fully operational, we know that a quantum computer will be able to break through all the traditional cyber defenses we currently use. So they and others are actively harvesting now, to decrypt later.”
Chinese researchers have already used quantum computers to begin, at least in part, to crack military-grade encryption.
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In response to this broader “quantum threat,” Apple has already developed and released a new security protocol, Post-Quantum 3 or PQ3, for its end-to-end encrypted iMessage app in an effort to protect users of iOS if or when that day. comes
Also in the US, Google has continued to develop its quantum chips that reduce the number of errors. It recently unveiled Willow, which Google claims can be infinitely faster than today’s fastest supercomputers.
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About Kate Irwin
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