Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave Quantum (QBTS, Financial), criticized NVIDIA's (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang's prediction that it could take 15 to 30 years to bring "useful quantum computers" to market. Huang's comments led to a 36% drop in D-Wave's stock. He mentioned that NVIDIA could produce traditional chips to work with quantum chips, but the quantum processing units required would be a million times the current capacity.
Baratz countered, stating that D-Wave's technology is already commercialized, with companies like Mastercard and Japan's NTT Docomo utilizing its quantum computers. Despite this, D-Wave's recent revenue fell 27% to $1.9 million from the previous year's $2.6 million. Quantum computing holds the promise of solving complex problems, such as encryption decoding and large-scale simulations, which current processors struggle with.
Interest in quantum computing surged last December after Google announced a breakthrough, completing a 100-qubit chip as part of its strategy to build a million-qubit system. This announcement fueled a 178% rise in D-Wave's stock in December, following a 185% increase the previous month. Other quantum computing stocks like Rigetti Computing and IonQ also saw significant volatility.
Baratz acknowledged that gate-based quantum computing might take decades, but argued that D-Wave's annealing method is usable now. Despite NVIDIA's refusal to comment, Baratz remains confident in D-Wave's capabilities, suggesting that its systems can solve problems beyond NVIDIA's fastest systems.
