The AI chipmaker’s cloud is years late to an already crowded arena. Microsoft Corp. started Azure Quantum in 2019, with Amazon Web Services launching Braket that same year. IBM Corp.-backed startup Strangeworks Inc. was founded in 2017 and has dozens of quantum computers on its cloud. But Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will integrate Nvidia’s quantum simulator into their offerings, Costa said.
The world’s most powerful countries and corporations are pledging billions of dollars to quantum computing research, although there are few known instances where a quantum computer has run practical applications. The global zeal stems from the promise of computation speeds that are hundreds of millions times faster than supercomputers today, along with fear of the consequences — both military and commercial — for those who miss out.
For most of the 2010s, Nvidia was largely a bystander in that push. But it’s now a key player in quantum research after its graphics processing units, designed to speed up video games, paid dividends thanks to their ability to execute a certain type of computation quickly.
A similar version of these calculations is used in quantum computer simulations, making Nvidia AI chips such as the H100 Tensor Core GPUs an important component of quantum research. The GPU is now also powerful enough to run classical algorithms once too big for computers, such as those used for drug and materials discovery and other scientific domains, said Costa.
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Separately, Nvidia also said that its chips will be used in the publicly-funded ABCI-Q supercomputer that Fujitsu Ltd. is building for the quantum computing research arm of Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. The supercomputer will use more than 2,000 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs and will be deployed early next year.
The company said that supercomputers at Denmark’s Novo Nordisk Foundation and Australia’s Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, both dedicated to research into quantum computing and other fields of cutting-edge technology, will also use Nvidia hardware.
Updates to clarify supercomputer usage in final paragraph
