Once the biggest critic, Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang seemed to be having a change of heart about quantum computing when he declared in June that it had reached an “inflection point” with commercial viability.
And now Huang’s about-face appears to be complete as he’s backing up his words with money.
When Honeywell International (HON) announced last week a $600-million funding round for its quantum computing unit, Quantinuum, the investors included one especially notable name: NVentures, NVIDIA's venture capital arm.
This is reportedly Nvidia’s first-ever investment in the quantum computing space.
The chip giant was joined by JPMorganChase, Mitsui, Amgen, Cambridge Quantum Holdings, Serendipity Capital, Quanta Computer, QED Investors and Honeywell in the funding round.
Quantinuum has been valued at $10 billion after the latest capital raise.
According to a release detailing the latest funding round, Quantinuum will work with NVIDIA as a founding collaborator on breakthroughs at the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center.
In addition to its collaboration with the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center, Quantinumm has also launched collaborations with RIKEN, SoftBank Corp., Infineon and STFC Hartree Center.
Honeywell said the capital raise is being used to support Quantinuum's “advancement of quantum computing at scale,” including the expected launch later this year of Helios, the company’s next-generation quantum computing system.
The funding will also go toward supporting Quantinuum's goal of becoming the first to perform universal fault-tolerant computing.
"Quantinuum continues to meet and exceed our stated objectives — strategically, technically and commercially,” said Honeywell chairman and CEO Vimal Kapur. “We have complete confidence in Quantinuum's ability to continue to lead the quantum revolution and create long-term value for its investors and customers."
For Huang, the participation of NVentures in Quantinuum’s latest capital raise appears to signal a dramatic shift in his sentiment toward the quantum computing space from the beginning of the year.
During a Q&A with Wall Street analysts at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in January, Huang cast doubt on the progress being made by the sector toward commercialization.
"If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that'd probably be on the early side," Huang said. "If you said 30 is probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it."
While most industry watchers believe that commercialization of quantum computing is still years away, Huang’s prediction of it being two decades away raised eyebrows.
And it caused the shares of some of the best-known quantum computing companies to plunge – including Rigetti Computing (RGTI), D-Wave Systems (QBTS) and Quantum Computing (QUBT).
However, during his keynote speech at NVIDIA’s GTC Paris developer conference in June, Huang said that quantum computing had reached an “inflection point” and could start solving real-world problems in a few years.
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