Why the Most Valuable Company Is Buying into Quantum Computing (time.com)

NVIDIA’s venture arm has quietly put big money behind quantum startups—including Quantinuum, QuEra and PsiQuantum—helping to value the sector at over $17 billion and marking a clear strategic pivot from CEO Jensen Huang’s earlier, more skeptical timeline. The move is significant because it signals that the world’s most valuable AI hardware vendor is betting on quantum as a complementary future compute paradigm, and it likely gives NVIDIA early visibility into which qubit approaches scale. Analysts expect the investments could lead to acquisitions, and NVIDIA has already been building classical–quantum bridges (CUDA‑Q, an accelerated quantum research center) that position it as the classical compute hub for quantum systems. Technically, the startups pursue different qubit technologies—ions (Quantinuum), photons (PsiQuantum) and neutral atoms (QuEra)—which exploit superposition and entanglement to tackle a small set of extremely hard problems (e.g., chemistry simulation, materials, and factoring) that classical GPUs can’t solve tractably. Quantum processors “love precision, not data,” so they won’t replace GPU-driven large‑scale ML training but will rely on vast classical compute for control, error correction and readout. Timelines remain uncertain—useful, large‑scale quantum machines may still be years away—but NVIDIA’s integration into the classical layer ensures it will be central to hybrid quantum workflows even before full quantum advantage arrives.