Nvidia’s Quantum Strategy Is Shifting Market Power Toward A Lesser‑Known Player

05 December 2024, Bavaria, Munich: A quantum computer being built by the start-up IQM Germany is located in a data center. IQM is building the European quantum computer Euro-Q-Exa for the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ). The acquisition of the Euro-Q-Exa quantum system at the LRZ secures the Free State of Bavaria a leading position in quantum technology in Europe. Photo: Sven Hoppe/dpa (Photo by Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty Images)

dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images

Nvidia stock is up about 13% this year.

A sizeable chunk of that gain occurred last week. Shares of the chip design giant rose 6% following the company’s April 14 press release about “new open-source AI models designed to advance” quantum computing, according to CNBC.

QC can get answers to complex problems much faster than classical computing. However, since QCs are so error prone and difficult to operate, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was skeptical of their value in January 2025 but changed his mind after he saw evidence of companies actually using the technology.

Last year, Nvidia started investing in QC software, and this week’s press release about Ising — open-source models aimed at accelerating QC adoption — spurred rallies in leading QC providers.

Quantum Stocks Jumped After Nvidia’s Announcement

The big pops since the press release and the stocks’ level relative to their highs for the last year include:

• IONQ (share price up 52% since April 13, which is 46% below the stock’s 52-week high reached last October)
• D-Wave Quantum (+46%, -54%)
• Quantum Computing (+30%, -63%)
• Rigetti Computing (+30%, -66%)

Huang expressed enthusiasm for Ising. “AI is essential to making quantum computing practical,” Huang said in a statement featured by CNBC. “With Ising, AI becomes the control plane — the operating system of quantum machines — transforming fragile qubits to scalable and reliable quantum” Graphics Processing Unit systems, he added.

Nvidia Isn’t Dominant In QC The Way It Is In AI

But Nvidia is not as far ahead in QC as it was in artificial intelligence. Back in 2007, Huang bet developers would prefer Nvidia-designed GPUs if the company built software — dubbed CUDA — to help them deploy the company’s chips.

Ising faces considerable competition, and the QC market opportunity is much smaller than the AI chip market.

Yet Nvidia could contribute to the growth of the QC industry. And that’s why Infleqtion — a lesser-known QC company with close ties to Nvidia — could be a bigger winner than the four QC providers whose shares popped so much last week, noted short-seller Andrew Left, according to Business Insider.

QC share prices are extremely volatile — and seem to rise heavily whenever a big company like Nvidia issues a bullish press release — and then fall back afterward. Until QC is demonstrably more reliable, I am staying away from these stocks.

What Quantum Computing Actually Does

Quantum computers use qubits — which for an 8-qubit QC can represent 256 possible states simultaneously, according to Harvard Business Review. A QC is potentially much faster than a classical computer. For instance, an 8-bit classical computer can only represent one number between 0 and 255 at a time, HBR added.

This property makes it possible for QCs to solve problems with many possible answers much faster. For example, a QC algorithm to find prime factors of large numbers reduced the time to get a result from billions of years to a few days, based on work by mathematician Peter Shore featured by HBR.

Yet QCs are far from reliable. Banks running complex risk models and drug companies testing new molecules have been waiting years for reliability to improve.

How so? Before a QC can run a useful calculation, “a team of specialists has to spend days manually tuning the system. Even after that, the machine keeps making mistakes faster than existing software can catch them,” wrote Business Insider.

To make the machines more reliable, the industry needs solutions to two problems: quantum error correction and calibration, Huang noted in the April 13 press release.

How Nvidia Went From QC Skepticism To Optimism

Those technical problems are at the core of Huang’s long posture of skepticism about QC’s viability. In January 2025, he said that QC could be 15 to 30 years away from offering practical solutions to business problems, CNBC noted.

His turnaround took place at a March 2025 Nvidia conference. “This is the first event in history where a company CEO invites all of the guests to explain why he was wrong,” Huang said in his opening keynote, where he hosted 12 quantum CEOs on stage, CNBC reported. QC “is scaling a lot faster than classical computing did,” Huang added.

Huang also announced a bet on a Boston-area research center to help Nvidia overcome the impediments to realizing the technology’s potential. Three months later, at a Paris developer conference, he said QC was at an inflection point — which drove up the price of the QC stocks listed above.

Last week, Huang explained that Ising “provides high-performance, scalable AI tools” to solve QC’s error corrections and calibration challenges.

Ising directly targets both problems. One model cuts the setup time from days to hours by reading a qubit’s output when it happens and automating the tuning process. A second model makes a QC three times more accurate by catching and correcting mistakes as the system runs. “Both models run on an organization’s own systems, so data stays on site,” PYMNTS reported.

Will QC Be Nvidia’s Next Big Growth Opportunity?

Although I find the concept appealing, the small market size and Nvidia’s open-source software lead me to conclude QC may not become the next big growth opportunity for Nvidia. Here are reasons:

• The entire market opportunity is much smaller than Nvidia’s current revenue. For example, Nvidia’s roughly $200 billion current annualized revenue run rate is many times larger than 2025’s $1.9 billion global quantum revenue estimate — growing at about 30% annually, per QED-C.
• Nvidia’s QC software is open source. Because NVQLink is open to controller vendors — such as Quantum Machines, Qblox and Keysight, according to SDxCentral — AMD or Intel could offer their own versions of the software which would limit CUDA-like customer lock-in.
• Nvidia has said it will stay out of QC hardware. “We don’t build quantum computers, and yet we are deeply integrated into the quantum computing industry.” Huang said earlier this month, per Next Platform. Yet Nvidia is spreading its bets across various qubit makers — including a $1 billion bet on photonic leader PsiQuantum, participation in Quantinuum’s $600 million funding round and a stake in neutral-atom leader QuEra NVentures venture arm, according to Substack.
• Nvidia is partnering with smaller QC companies. Meanwhile IBM — which aims for a commercially viable system by 2029 — Google, Microsoft, Amazon and PsiQuantum run their own vertically-integrated stacks, notes Quantum Computing Report.

Should Investors Buy QC Stocks?

Given their wild movements in response to press releases and the early stages of the industry’s development, these stocks could be good for short-term traders who can buy low and sell right after the stock pops on bullish news.

However, I am skeptical of investing in these stocks for the long run. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by Left’s suggestion that Infleqtion would be worth buying, especially since he is known as a short-seller.

His argument in favor of buying the stock is the depth of the company’s partnership with Nvidia. “The smallest public quantum company by market cap was selected the most by the most important AI infrastructure company on earth,” according to Citron’s April 16, 2026 X post featured by Business Insider. “NVIDIA ranked these companies for you. The stock market hasn’t caught up yet.”

Unlike rivals Rigetti and D-Wave, Nvidia has selected Infleqtion for two partnerships — “calibration AND decoding,” yet trades at half the market cap of Rigetti, a company NVIDIA didn’t select at all, Left added.

The first question to ask is whether investors should take action in response to Citron’s social media posts.

To assess this, consider the following: Left has been charged with “bait-and-switch trading” — promoting his position to followers, waiting for the stock to move and then secretly reversing his position on 26 occasions — netting an estimated $20 million in illegal profits, according to a July 2024 SEC complaint.

Left denied the allegations, stating he did not engage in “bait-and-switch” trading, according to Bloomberg. He argued that risk management required him to “trim” positions after they moved. He claimed the government’s use of “immediately” to describe his trades was inaccurate and that he was being targeted for his bearish views, the Bloomberg report added.

Left’s trial was continued from March 17, 2026 to May 11, 2026, at 8:30 a.m., according to the Department of Justice. Although he’s confident he will prevail, Left said his anxiety has increased as his court date nears. “I’m very nervous,” he told Business Insider on April 19. “The trial is a trial. To say you’re not nervous would be hubris.”

Having said that, the investment reasons to invest in Infleqtion are worth considering. Nvidia selected Infleqtion for both calibration and decoding initiatives within its Ising framework; the company’s valuation — price/sales ratio of 122 — significantly lags Rigetti’s 866; the company has $550 million in cash and generated $32.5 million in 2025 revenue; and it has contracts with NASA, the U.S. Army and the Department of Energy.

Nevertheless, with the stock up 100% since bottoming out March 20 and the allegations against Left, I would be interested in learning whether his position in the stock has changed since his April 16 X post.