There’s a possibility quantum computing will become useful in 3 to 5 years

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Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates thinks useful quantum computing won’t need decades to arrive.

“There is the possibility that he [Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang] could be wrong. There is the possibility in the next three to five years that one of these techniques would get enough true logical Qubits to solve some very tough problems. And Microsoft is a competitor in that space,” Gates said on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid podcast (video above; listen below).

Microsoft said in November 2024 that it was co-designing and building “the world’s most powerful quantum machine.”

It’s expected to be released later this year.

“And I regularly review that work [at Microsoft]. And I’m quite impressed with it, but Jensen is correct, it could take longer. This is both in terms of how you build a quantum computer and what software you write that can solve problems that other computers couldn’t write. There’s some hard work to be done, and Microsoft has been in this field a long time, as well as Google and many, many, many players,” Gates explained.

Gates is on the other side of the quantum computing trade, it seems.

Nvidia (NVDA) founder Jensen Huang kicked off the quantum controversy in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

“If you said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that would probably be on the early side,” Huang opined. “If you said 30, it’s probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it.”

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Huang is still bullish on Nvidia’s role in developing quantum computing through its artificial intelligence chip technology.

Then fellow tech billionaire and Huang’s friend Meta (META) founder Mark Zuckerberg tossed cold water on quantum computing.

Zuckerberg said on the Joe Rogan podcast he sees quantum’s potential as still a “decade-plus out.”

“I’m not really an expert on quantum computing — my understanding is that’s still quite a ways off from being a very useful paradigm,” Zuckerberg said.

The downbeat commentary wreaked havoc on the red-hot quantum computing trade, which kicked off in early December when Google unveiled its high-power quantum chip, dubbed Willow.

D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) and Rigetti Computing (RGTI) — the two main quantum trades being played by retail investors — are down 36% and 22.5%, respectively year to date.

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