For those with short memories, in January, Huang casually lobbed a grenade into the quantum computing world by suggesting the tech wouldn’t be useful for at least 20 years, possibly longer.
That offhand remark sent quantum stocks spiralling faster than one of Elon [Roman Salute] Musk's surprise spontaneous disassembly rocket ships. Share prices in Quantum Cats both rose and fell simultaneously.
At Nvidia’s ironically titled “Quantum Day” at the GTC conference, Huang pulled a full reverse ferret, saying—whoopsie—he might’ve been a bit off the mark.
“This is the first event in history where a company CEO invites all of the guests to explain why he was wrong,” he said.
Huang expressed surprise that quantum companies were public in the first place, asking, “How could a quantum computer company be public?”—a question that might have been better asked before tanking their share prices with doom-laden prophecies.
The event featured no fewer than a dozen quantum startups and a gaggle of Microsoft and Amazon Web Services types. A few executives from the quantum side had previously hit back at Huang’s downbeat forecast, and the mood at the panels hovered somewhere between “friendly reconciliation” and “tech industry group therapy.”
To keep things cosy, Nvidia is now opening a quantum research centre in Boston, where scientists from Harvard, MIT, and various VC-backed startups can gather around racks of Blackwell AI servers and collectively pretend that AGI is just around the corner.
Huang said: “Of course, quantum computing has the potential and all of our hopes that it will deliver extraordinary impact.. but the technology is insanely complicated.”
He also acknowledged that traditional computing—*accelerated* computing, as he calls it—might still be relevant for a while. It has been a long while, as no quantum system has yet demonstrated any significant value outside of laboratory conditions and marketing materials.
“A long time ago, somebody asked me, ‘So what’s accelerated computing good for?’” Huang said at the panel.
“I said, a long time ago, because I was wrong, this is going to replace computers,” he said. “This is going to be the way computing is done, and and everything, everything is going to be better. And it turned out I was wrong.”
