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Nvidia (NVDA-1.54%) chief executive Jensen Huang apologized for tanking quantum computing stocks earlier this year when he said the technology’s usefulness is still decades away — but one analyst says he’s actually right.
During a Quantum Day session at the company’s annual GTC developer conference, Huang said he didn’t know there were publicly traded quantum computing companies when he made comments in January that led the stocks to fall by more than 40%.
“My first reaction was, I didn’t know they were public,” Huang said in remarks reported by Bloomberg. “How can a quantum company be public?”
Huang said the event, which included executives from several quantum firms as well as Amazon (AMZN+0.37%) and Microsoft (MSFT-0.33%), was the first “in history where a company CEO invites all of the guests to explain why he was wrong,” according to CNBC. He added that “quantum computing has the potential and all of our hopes that it will deliver extraordinary impact,” but that “the technology is insanely complicated.”
Despite the damage control, Huang “was right and all he did in January was point out the obvious fact that quantum computing is very unlikely to be a major economic force for another 15 years at least,” Richard Windsor, founder of research firm Radio Free Mobile, said in a note on Friday.
Windsor pointed out that quantum computing stocks continued to fall by double-digits even after Huang’s positive comments on Thursday. Although Huang and other quantum executives made a clear case for the need for quantum — more processing power for cheaper — Windsor said the technology still faces setbacks.
“[Q]uantum computers are only suited to doing certain types of tasks and when they are asked to do something else, all of the benefits that they offer evaporate leaving behind only the drawbacks,” Windsor said, adding that despite some current uses for scientific research, it will take years before going mainstream.
Windsor addressed another problem with scalability and reliability.
“Getting more than a few Qubits on a single chip, keeping the error rate down and making sure that the system is reliable remain huge issues and the industry is far from agreement on how these should be solved,” Windsor said.
Google (GOOGL+0.18%), Microsoft, and Amazon have all recently unveiled quantum computing chip prototypes that they claim can solve challenges with qubits — or quantum bits used by quantum computers. Qubits are usually electrons, photons, or another subatomic particle that when connected together have far more processing power than binary 0s and 1s used by classical computers.
But the different approaches are indicative of “how far the system has to go,” Windsor said, because there needs to be agreement before being able to reach economies of scale.
“This does not mean that quantum is no good or that it won’t take over from silicon eventually,” Windsor said, “but it does mean that it is going to take much longer than anyone thinks.”
Meanwhile, Windsor said, “the real problem” is that the publicly listed quantum companies “have absolutely no business being so.” These companies, Windsor said, will have “either gone bust or been purchased by larger companies like Google, Amazon or Microsoft” in the coming years.
Nvidia’s quantum event and its investment in a Boston-based quantum research center are good signs for a company with a “history of being ridiculously early when it comes to technology,” Windsor said. But the company is “right” to focus its business more on AI than on quantum for now.