Nvidia CEO

Jensen Huang’s single comment about the future of

quantum computing

triggered a massive selloff on Wednesday (January 8), wiping out approximately $8 billion in market value from quantum computing companies.
Major quantum computing players bore the brunt of the selloff.

IonQ

shares plummeted more than 40%, while Rigetti Computing crashed by over 45%.

D-Wave

saw its shares sink 36%, though the stock remains up about 600% over the past year.
During Nvidia’s analyst day at CES, Huang said getting “very useful quantum computers” to market could take 15 to 30 years. He told analysts that quantum computers would need 1 million times the number of

quantum processing units

, called qubits, that they currently have.

Nvidia CEO is “dead wrong”

“He’s dead wrong,” fired back D-Wave Quantum CEO Alan Baratz. “The reason he’s wrong is that we at D-Wave are commercial today,” Baratz told CNBC, citing major clients like Mastercard and NTT Docomo that are “using our quantum computers today in production to benefit their business operations.”
Baratz acknowledged that while Huang’s “comments may not be totally off-base for gate model quantum computers,” they are “100% off base for annealing quantum computers” – the technology D-Wave uses. He offered to meet Huang “any time, any place” to help fill in these knowledge gaps.
The quantum computing sector had seen increased attention following Google’s December announcement of its Willow

quantum chip

breakthrough. Google said it had completed a 100 qubit chip, marking the second of six steps in its strategy to build a quantum system with 1 million qubits. Before the selloff, D-Wave shares had soared 178% in December after rising 185% the previous month.