Practical Use Of Quantum Computers 20 Years Away: Nvidia Chief

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that any practical use of quantum computing technology is at least another two decades away.

Huang made his comments in a Q&A with Wall Street analysts this week at CES 2025, a major annual tech conference in Las Vegas, when asked about the future of the technology.

“Quantum computing can’t solve every problem,” the Nvidia chief said, adding that the tech was “good at small data, big compute” problems such as “truly generating a random number” and cryptography.

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“It’s not good at large data problems,” he said.

“If you kind of 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 picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it,” Huang said.

Huang’s statements triggered an $8 billion meltdown in the four biggest quantum computing shares — Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum, Quantum Computing and IonQ — in the United States on Wednesday.

The long wait throws cold water on a sector that was already expected to spend millions more on the technology, which can only perform niche calculations so far.

“If you kind of said 15 years… that’d probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it’s probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it,” he said on Tuesday.

“The 15 to 20-year timeline seems very realistic,” said Ivana Delevska, investment chief of Spear Invest, which holds Rigetti and IonQ shares in an actively managed ETF.

“That is roughly what it took Nvidia to develop accelerated computing.”

The four quantum computing stocks rose at least threefold last year and outperformed a more than twofold rise in Nvidia shares, thanks to a high-profile breakthrough in the technology at Google in December.

The technology is seen as a key national security undertaking, with countries counting on it to drive decryption for military purposes.