NVIDIA announces new quantum-integrated computing architecture
NVIDIA will undertake a new partnership to bring advanced artificial intelligence and quantum computing capabilities to the Department of Energy’s national laboratory apparatus, the company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, announced at the NVIDIA GTC event Tuesday.
NVIDIA’s NVQLink — a new computing architecture that combines classical computing and early-stage quantum computing systems — aims to offer scientists advanced computing capabilities through access to stabilized qubits. Private sector partners tapped by NVIDIA to help provide some of the hardware systems include companies Alice & Bob, Atom Computing, Quantinuum, Quantum Circuits Inc., QuEra, Rigetti, Silicon Quantum Computing, IonQ and more.
In unveiling NVQLink, Huang also said that NVIDIA, Oracle, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright are set to deploy two AI-ready supercomputers at Argonne National Laboratory. The computers, named Solstice and Equinox, will contain 100,000 and 10,000 of NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPUs, respectively, and are expected to be operational in the first half of 2026.
Between launching NVQLink and announcing the debut of Solstice and Equinox, Huang made the case that NVIDIA’s technology stack will be central to the future of computing, which, in turn, is also central to advancements in critical sciences.
“Computing is the fundamental instrument of science, and we are going through several platform shifts,” Huang said on Tuesday. “On the one hand, we’re going to accelerate computing. That’s why every future supercomputer will be [a] GPU-based supercomputer.”
Huang thanked both President Donald Trump and Wright at the event for their individual work in spearheading U.S.-based manufacturing efforts and expanding American leadership in science and technology.
“All of these different technologies are coming into science at exactly the same time,” he said. “Secretary Wright understands this, and he wants the DOE to take this opportunity to supercharge themselves and make sure that the United States stays at the forefront of science.”
NVQLink’s announcement comes as the tech industry moves to bring quantum computing-based solutions to the market via a hybrid approach. As developing and scaling a fault-tolerant quantum computer is still in its relative infancy, hybrid computing solutions aim to bring the best of both systems to bear on current problems.
“This integration with NVIDIA NVQLink marks a major step toward utility-scale quantum computing,” Mourad Beji, chief software officer at Pasqal, said in a statement.
For NVIDIA, hybrid computing means leveraging their advanced GPUs to connect with quantum processors as a means to improve error correction while data is transmitted through delicate qubits, resulting in two different computers working together to share data and process it correctly.
“We now realize that [it] is essential for us to connect a quantum computer directly to a GPU supercomputer, so that we could do the error correction, so that we could do the artificial intelligence calibration and control of the quantum computer, and so that we could do simulations collectively,” Huang said. “This is the future of quantum computing.”
NVIDIA has announced several partnerships with both the government and other private sector organizations in just the last year alone, including a planned supercomputer named Doudna at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and a partnership with Booz Allen announced today to build a wireless stack for 6G communications.
But the company has also faced scrutiny from lawmakers for its efforts to continue sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chips to China, a criticism that NVIDIA called “misguided.”
