Quantinuum's CEO says quantum computing could end up bigger than AI, but even quantum's own boosters admit that's a huge if

[AlexandrZakharyan]

Rajeeb Hazra, chief executive of quantum computing firm Quantinuum, recently valued at 10 billion dollars, made a bold claim on the BBC's Tech Life podcast, saying the area of quantum computing is, in his mind, as big if not bigger than AI once you actually look at the applications, and that consumers will touch its impacts in almost every walk of life

That's a striking thing to say out loud given how the two fields actually compare in scale right now. AI's economic value is already forecast in the trillions of dollars, while McKinsey estimates the entire quantum sector could be worth up to 97 billion dollars by 2035, a real number, but nowhere close to AI's current footprint. There are also believed to be only around 200 working quantum computers in the entire world right now, and unlike AI, which anyone can access instantly through a phone, quantum computers are still large, delicate laboratory instruments rather than anything resembling a consumer product

Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins offered a much more measured take, saying the potential is there but the jury is still out, and that early experiments suggest promise while also showing just how much more powerful hardware and further research is genuinely needed before quantum effects can be reliably applied to things like AI. He noted, half joking, that quantum computing used to be the most hyped technology he covered, until the AI craze came along and took that title instead

The two fields also share a less flattering similarity, both are currently living under real bubble anxiety. Mid-October saw analysts warn that some major quantum stocks could fall by as much as 62 percent, around the same time mutterings about an AI bubble were growing louder elsewhere in the market. And quantum computing has its own version of AI's hallucination problem too, error rates caused by how fragile qubit states are, disturbed by the smallest change in their environment, light, heat, or stray electromagnetic noise. Sustaining the conditions needed to keep qubits stable is such a serious engineering challenge that Elon Musk recently suggested, on X, that quantum computers might eventually run best inside the permanently shadowed craters of the Moon, where temperatures stay reliably close to absolute zero without needing expensive artificial refrigeration

The clever new tech that could make AI look stupidmetro.co.uk

[StevenArroyo]

Hazra obviously has every incentive to talk his own book here, but the underlying point about application breadth eventually mattering more than current market size isn't crazy on its own merits

[BrightRunner]

200 working quantum computers in the entire world compared to AI being accessible on every single smartphone on the planet is such a stark way to actually measure the real gap between these two technologies right now

[Reacher Mitchell]

The Musk moon crater comment is such a wonderfully absurd but genuinely serious engineering idea, natural near-absolute-zero temperatures would remove one of the biggest cost and complexity burdens in the entire field

[Connor82]

Hopkins going from quantum being the most hyped technology he covered to AI taking that crown is a nice little bit of self aware honesty about how fast hype cycles rotate through this industry

[Lion42]

97 billion by 2035 next to AI's trillions puts Hazra's bigger than AI claim in some pretty humbling context, that's a real gap to close even over a decade

[StarforgeSocket]

The shared bubble anxiety detail is worth remembering, both fields are extremely capital intensive and extremely reliant on continued investor patience, a rough correction in one could easily spook money away from the other too

[Supernova Freddie]

Genuinely can't tell if this ages as a bold correct prediction or a classic overreach quote in five years, feels like exactly the kind of statement that gets replayed either way depending on how things actually play out

[RheaRipley]

CEO saying quantum could be bigger than AI is peak CEO behavior, but the comparison is weird. AI is already transforming industries right now - quantum is still in the "maybe we'll crack error correction this decade" phase. The timelines don't match. AI's impact is measured in quarters. Quantum's impact is measured in decades. That said, if quantum computing actually delivers on the promise - drug discovery, materials science, optimization problems that are impossible today - the economic value could be astronomical. The "if" is the size of a planet though. The bubble anxiety is real for both. Investors are pouring billions into quantum startups with no clear path to profitability. Sound familiar?

[Violet Dean]

The "bigger than AI" framing misses the point. They're not competing technologies - they're complementary. AI excels at pattern recognition, prediction, and generating outputs from data. Quantum excels at specific computational problems: factoring, simulation, certain optimization tasks. The real magic happens when you combine them. Quantum machine learning is still early, but imagine using quantum computers to train models that are impossible to train classically. That's where the breakthrough could come. The problem is we're still in the NISQ era - noisy, intermediate-scale quantum. Nothing useful yet. The boosters know this, but they also know hype attracts funding. It's a delicate dance.

[VoidSentinel74]

Going to push back on the skepticism a bit. Yes, quantum computing has been "five years away" for thirty years. But the progress is real. Quantinuum's 10 billion dollar valuation isn't just hype - they've got working hardware, paying customers (even if the use cases are limited), and a roadmap. The error correction problem is being attacked from multiple angles. Some approaches are showing promise. The timeline is still uncertain, but "never" is increasingly implausible. The AI comparison is still overblown, but quantum's potential is genuine. The question isn't "will it work" but "when will it work at scale." And that's where even the boosters get vague.

[StarforgeSocket]

Tangent: the capital intensity point is crucial. Both AI and quantum are burning cash at rates that would make a dot-com CEO blush. AI has the advantage of immediate revenue - companies are paying for AI now. Quantum is mostly grants, government contracts, and investor patience. That patience has limits. If quantum doesn't show useful results soon, the funding could dry up. The shared bubble anxiety is real. The difference: AI's bubble could deflate without killing the technology. Quantum's bubble deflating could set the field back decades. The stakes are higher, which makes the CEO hype even more frustrating. They're playing with fire.

[UltraWarren94]

Final thought: both AI and quantum are transformative, but on different timelines and for different reasons. AI is transforming how we work, create, and communicate right now. Quantum might transform how we discover drugs, design materials, and solve optimization problems... eventually. The comparison is apples and oranges. The bubble anxiety is justified for both, but the consequences of a bubble bursting are different. AI deflating means slower progress. Quantum deflating means the whole field could stall. The smart money is on both being important, neither being "bigger" in a simple sense. The future probably has both technologies maturing and finding their niches. The CEOs will keep hyping, the investors will keep funding, and the rest of us will keep watching. That's how tech revolutions work - messy, uncertain, and impossible to predict.

[TrueJason25]

The real question nobody's asking: what problems will quantum actually solve that AI can't? AI is great at approximate solutions to messy real-world problems. Quantum is theoretically great at exact solutions to specific mathematical problems. The overlap is... limited. Drug discovery, maybe. Materials design, maybe. Financial optimization, maybe. But most business problems don't need quantum. They need better data, better models, better processes. AI addresses those. Quantum addresses a narrow slice of computationally hard problems. That's not a knock on quantum - it's just reality. The "bigger than AI" claim requires quantum to suddenly unlock applications we can't even imagine. Possible, but not something to bet on.