D-Wave CEO says Nvidia should be ‘shaking in their boots’ as quantum computing battles AI GPUs

As AI compute needs multiply, one quantum computing firm says it has the edge over Nvidia (NVDA).

“If I was Nvidia, I’d be shaking in my boots,” D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) CEO Alan Baratz told Yahoo Finance at the Semafor World Economy Summit.

Baratz’s company, which develops the hardware and software for quantum systems, claims the AI chip giant is building processors that would be increasingly difficult to power.

“Our quantum computer takes about ten kilowatts of power to run,” Baratz noted, comparing the draw to roughly five or ten GPUs. He pointed to a problem solved in minutes that he claimed would take a massive GPU system nearly a million years and “the world’s power” to complete.

The timing is calculated. April 14 is World Quantum Day, and the sector is surging. Shares of D-Wave jumped nearly 16% on Tuesday, while IonQ (IONQ) soared 18% after scaling its commercial systems beyond a single processor.

Not to be outdone, Nvidia unveiled “Ising,” a family of open-source quantum AI models for error correction.

Nvidia’s move suggests it wants to be the operating system of quantum. “AI is essential to making quantum computing practical,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. It is a hedge: If you can’t beat quantum efficiency, own the software that controls it.

Shares of D-Wave are up roughly 140% over the last year, despite slipping about 3% in the past 30 days.

In Q4 2025, D-Wave reported $2.75 million in revenue — a 19% year-over-year increase…