uantum computing isn’t relegated to the lab anymore, and CES 2026 turned into a bit of a launch party. The biggest trade show in the US had an entire pavilion dedicated to showcasing quantum innovation, and companies large and small shared their progress and products. Our big takeaway? Quantum and AI will have a symbiotic relationship.

“I can foresee a world where a quantum processing unit, a QPU, would coexist alongside the GPU and the CPU,” Dr. Pouya Dianat, chief revenue officer of Quantum Computing Inc., told The Deep View.

Quantum and AI can be buddy-buddy in more ways than one:

• For starters, AI can accelerate the development and research of quantum systems. Dianat told me that Nvidia GPUs, for example, are commonly used to accelerate quantum machines.
• And quantum computers, meanwhile, can reduce the “computational load” on an AI model by handling more complex workloads. “You don't go to a quantum computer, for instance, to ask, what is two multiplied by two?” said Dianat. “There are typical calculation math problems where a quantum computer is not necessarily a fit.

Offloading the computational burden from AI can massively reduce the energy usage and costs AI can rack up, Murray Thom, VP of Quantum Technology Evangelism at D-Wave, told The Deep View. 

For example, in a paper published in March by D-Wave comparing the energy usage of supercomputers to that of quantum computers in dealing with some of the most complex and difficult equations, a quantum computer was able to complete the problem using less than $1 of energy, while a supercomputer would have needed the amount of energy that the entire world uses in a year. The supercomputer would also take quite literally a million years to solve these kinds of problems, while the quantum system would take minutes. 

“It's very energy-efficient compute for hard problems,” said Thom. “If we can identify how to shift some of those hard problems onto quantum compute, we can ease the energy burden on our data centers.”