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Last week, the entire tech community, including investors and enthusiasts, turned their attention to one of the year’s most highly anticipated events.
The Nvidia GTC (GPU technology conference) is a week-long event that serves as a platform for the company to unveil its newest devices. This year, Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang showed off the new Blackwell Ultra and Rubin graphics processing units (GPUs), its latest artificial intelligence (AI) chips.
This week’s conference also introduced a new addition to the Nvidia GTC lineup, something the company had not done in previous years. Thursday, March 20, marked the first Nvidia Quantum Day, an event centered around the company’s quantum computing plans.
Huang revealed that Nvidia has big plans for quantum computing in the coming year, highlighting it as an important tech market. But he did something unexpected that took the industry by surprise.
Huang said the words that most guests weren’t expecting to hear
On Nvidia Quantum Day 2025, Huang took the stage along with the CEOs of several prominent quantum computing companies. The list of experts included D-Wave Systems (QBTS) CEO Alan Baratz, Peter Chapman, executive chair of IonQ (IONQ) and John Levy, CEO and Co-Founder of SEEQC.
While addressing this panel of industry leaders, Huang addressed a statement he had previously made, in which he stated that he believed useful quantum computing systems were still 15-20 years away, sending quantum stocks into free fall. This led to a backlash from quantum experts, including Baratz, who made it clear he ddisagreedwith Huang’s thesis.
On the stage at Quantum Day 2025, Huang walked back his earlier prediction, admitting that he’d been incorrect. “This is the first event in history where a company CEO invites all of the guests to explain why he was wrong,” he noted, highlighting the unprecedented nature of the event.
Later Huang discussed the logic behind his previous statements on quantum, admitting surprise that his comments impacted quantum computing stocks as they did. He clarified, though, that he believes in the importance of quantum technology and isn’t threatened by its progress.
“A long time ago, somebody asked me, ‘So what’s accelerated computing good for?” he recalled. “I said, a long time ago, because I was wrong, this is going to replace computers,” he said. “This is going to be the way computing is done, and everything, everything is going to be better. And it turned out I was wrong.”