The ABR Intelligence Report: AI Gets a Quantum Link
National supercomputing labs aim to accelerate AI workloads by linking quantum computing with GPUs.
Quantum computing is closer than it appears. A recent NVIDIA announcement brings its use into the realm of AI. Specifically, the company announced NVIDIA NVQLink, an open system architecture for tightly coupling the extreme performance of GPU computing with quantum processors to build accelerated quantum supercomputers.
Why does this matter? For years, the industry has discussed its potential to deliver the computing power required in various applications. Some prominent use cases include the capabilities of quantum computing to solve large-scale combinatorial optimization problems using massive parallelism, as well as to support encryption analysis and secure communication modeling.
The IEEE “The Impact of Technology in 2025“ assessment noted that approximately 30% of leading institutions, including national labs and academic supercomputing centers, have fully implemented quantum computing, while another 35% have initiated implementation.
According to the IEEE, quantum computing is a potential game-changer that is gaining traction. The reason for such interest is that (again, according to the IEEE) “quantum computing enables computing power a trillion times higher than today’s most advanced supercomputers and can help companies tackle challenges that traditional computers cannot.”
ABR Intelligence News Analysis
National Labs Get a Quantum Performance Leap
U.S. national laboratories, led by the Department of Energy, will use NVIDIA NVQLink to accelerate the use of quantum computing. Many of these labs played a crucial role in the development of the solution.
In particular, researchers from national laboratories, including Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories, guided the development of NVQLink. The aim of which was to provide an open approach to quantum integration.
IBM Develops a New Quantum Chip
This month, IBM announced the Loon chip (officially referenced as IBM Quantum Loon), which is an experimental quantum processor. The company described the chip as having “demonstrated all hardware elements of fault-tolerant quantum computing.”
IBM touts the chip as being a major engineering milestone toward scalable, fault-tolerant quantum hardware. That means the labs could use the technology in the future to build a quantum computer that can reliably correct its own errors.
The Loon chip is built using advanced 300 mm semiconductor wafer fabrication at the Albany NanoTech Complex in New York. The fabrication technology has been the standard in leading-classical chip fabrication facilities, and in this case, it is being used for quantum chips.
HPE Launches the Quantum Scaling Alliance
Also this month, HPE and a consortium of seven other technology organizations announced the formation of the Quantum Scaling Alliance, a global initiative dedicated to making quantum computing scalable, practical, and transformative across industries.
The consortium was formed to design and develop a practical, useful, and cost-effective quantum supercomputer by leveraging the expertise of today’s supercomputing and semiconductor ecosystems. Founding members of the Quantum Scaling Alliance and their areas of expertise are:
1QBit: Fault-tolerant quantum error correction design and simulation, algorithm compilation, and automated resource estimations
Applied Materials: Materials engineering and semiconductor fabrication
HPE: Full-stack quantum-HPC integration and software developments
Qolab: Qubit and circuit design
Quantum Machines: Hybrid quantum-classical control for scalable quantum computing
Riverlane: Quantum error correction
Synopsys: Simulation and analysis technology, EDA tools, and semiconductor IP
University of Wisconsin: Algorithms, benchmarks.
Thanks for these insights. You've been watching the supercomputing space for years and saw the viability of quantum computing coming. There's still a way to go, but the number of recent successes is promising. I look forward to future reports on quantum use cases.