Nvidia is not acting like a company that believes quantum computing is 20 years away from reaching its potential.
More than two months after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that “very useful” quantum computers could be 20 years away, Nvidia this week is hosting a Quantum Day at its Spring GTC event. In addition to that, in the biggest signal yet that Nvidia is working to accelerate the timeline for practical quantum computing, the company announced that it will open the Nvidia Accelerated Quantum Research Center (NVAQC) later this year in Boston.
The NVAQC will bring together Nvidia’s numerous existing quantum computing partners, including including Quantinuum, Quantum Machines, and QuEra Computing, along with researchers from the the Harvard Quantum Initiative in Science and Engineering (HQI) and the Engineering Quantum Systems (EQuS) group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to advance quantum computing on multiple fronts. The center also will host quantum hardware with AI supercomputers, namely Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems, along with the firm’s CUDA-Q quantum development platform to enable what the company called “accelerated quantum supercomputing.”
The new center did not rate a mention during Huang’s two-and-a-half-hour GTC keynote this week, but he said in a statement “Quantum computing will augment AI supercomputers to tackle some of the world’s most important problems, from drug discovery to materials development. Working with the wider quantum research community to advance CUDA-quantum hybrid computing, the Nvidia Accelerated Quantum Research Center is where breakthroughs will be made to create large-scale, useful, accelerated quantum supercomputers.”
The GB200 NVL72 systems will allow for complex simulations of quantum systems and the deployment of the low-latency quantum hardware control algorithms essential for quantum error correction, the company stated. Nvidia’s rack-scale monster also will be used to accelerate the adoption of AI algorithms in quantum computing research.
The selection of Boston for the NVAQC is not only notable for the close proximity to Harvard and MIT, but also because it’s home to QuEra. That Boston firm already is working with Nvidia in Japan in a hybrid quantum-classical supercomputing project, and this week during GTC, Nvidia also posted a blog about the partners’ work on quantum error correction. The companies described in the blog post how they developed a transformer-based-AI decoder, trained with Nvidia PhysicsNeMo that out-performed an early decoder on error correction.
“We are thrilled to be among the founding collaborators of the NVAQC,” said QuEra CEO Andy Ory in a statement. “By combining Nvidia’s remarkable accelerated computing capabilities with our leadership in quantum technologies, we’re able to collaboratively tackle critical scaling challenges, rapidly iterate on simulations for our hardware and push the boundaries of quantum circuit design.”
Mikhail Lukin, Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor at Harvard and a co-director of HQI, added, “The NVAQC is a very special addition to the unique Boston area quantum ecosystem, including word-leading university groups and startup companies. The accelerated quantum and classical computing technologies Nvidia is bringing together has the potential to advance the research in areas ranging from quantum error correction to applications of quantum computing systems, accelerating quantum computing research and pulling useful quantum computing closer to reality.”
While Huang’s comments about quantum back in January created an uproar, many people in the quantum sector knew that long before those statements the company was working aggressively to compress the timeline of quantum computing utility. This week, it took the next step in that work with its NVAQC plans.