Nvidia Says AI Can Finally Make Quantum Computing Work

Quantum computers are supposed to be the most powerful machines ever built. Getting them to run has been the hard part.

Before one 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. Banks running complex risk models and drug companies testing new molecules have been waiting on the same problem for years.

Nvidia thinks it has a fix. In a Tuesday (April 14) news release, the artificial intelligence company announced its launch of Ising, the world’s first family of open-source AI models built to solve those two problems: getting quantum systems ready to run, and keeping them running accurately. The models don’t change the underlying hardware. They make the hardware that already exists usable.

Why the Machines Keep Failing

Quantum processors pick up interference from their surrounding environment constantly, which throws off their calculations. Getting one ready to use has meant days of manual work — specialists reading output, finding where performance has slipped, and adjusting the system back into working order. Even once it’s running, mistakes pile up faster than existing software can fix them.

In a Tuesday blog post, Nvidia said the best quantum processors today make an error roughly once in every thousand operations. To become genuinely useful for business problems, that rate needs to reach one in a trillion.

Ising directly targets both problems. According to Nvidia, one model reads the processor’s output in real time and automates the tuning process, cutting setup time from days to hours. A second model catches and corrects mistakes as the system runs, delivering up to 3x improvement in accuracy compared to the current industry standard at relevant operating conditions. Both models run on an organization’s own systems, so data stays on site.

“AI is essential to making quantum computing practical,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in the release. “With Ising, AI becomes the control plane, the operating system of quantum machines.”

The industries That Have Been Waiting Longest

Banks have long seen quantum computing as a way to run risk and portfolio calculations that today’s computers cannot fully handle at scale. Classical systems manage this by approximating — they simplify the problem to make it solvable. Quantum processors don’t need to.

JPMorgan Chase’s applied research team has been developing quantum algorithms for portfolio optimization, option pricing and risk analysis. The team has noted that standard simulation methods for option pricing require millions of computational samples, while quantum approaches can reach comparable results in far fewer. Unreliable machines have been among the biggest obstacles to moving that work out of the lab.

In the healthcare realm, developing a new medicine means understanding how molecules behave at an atomic level, a problem so complex that today’s computers have to simplify it to make it manageable. As reported by McKinsey, pharmaceutical companies including AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim and have been running quantum pilots aimed at shortening drug development timelines. Those programs have produced early results. Unstable hardware has limited how fast they can move.

Open Models, Active Adoption

According to Nvidia, the Ising models are already in use at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, IonQ, IQM Quantum Computers, and the U.K. National Physical Laboratory.

The release fits a pattern Nvidia has used before: put down the software layer first, grow the ecosystem around it and build hardware relationships on top. Ising connects to Nvidia’s existing quantum software platform and its hardware interconnect between quantum and classical processors.

Google last month said organizations should complete their shift to quantum-resistant security by 2029, citing faster-than-expected progress in quantum hardware and error correction, as PYMNTS reported. Nvidia’s Ising launch is the latest signal that the industry is moving from preparing for quantum computing to building the infrastructure to run it.