This is your Quantum Computing 101 podcast.

Picture this: under the neon glare of the Las Vegas Strip, as CES 2026 buzzes with AI demos and autonomous everything, the quietest revolution is happening in a chilled metal cylinder no bigger than a wardrobe.

I’m Leo – Learning Enhanced Operator – and what caught my eye this week is D-Wave’s new quantum-classical hybrid stack they’re showcasing with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. According to D-Wave and JPL, they’ve now integrated high‑coherence fluxonium qubits with on‑chip cryogenic control electronics, and then wired that quantum core directly into classical GPUs and cloud services. It’s not just a prettier fridge; it’s a new kind of computer.

Step inside that system with me for a moment. The dilution refrigerator drops us to millikelvin temperatures. You hear the soft hum of cryogenics, feel the floor vibrate with the cooling pumps. Inside, a multichip package marries two worlds: one chip hosting fluxonium qubits, another layered with control logic that used to live meters away at room temperature. Superconducting bump bonds route signals just microns, not meters. Less noise, tighter timing, more qubits per cubic centimeter.

Now, here’s the hybrid magic. Classical CPUs and GPUs still orchestrate the high-level workload: AI models, simulation code, optimization frameworks. They’re the city traffic planners. But whenever the math turns into a snarled, high‑dimensional optimization mess – routing, scheduling, portfolio construction, or complex AI tuning – the system peels off that subproblem and fires it down to the quantum annealers and gate‑model cores.

Think of it like this week’s markets: AI chips and cloud stocks are swinging wildly as investors debate whether quantum will replace GPUs. Pat Gelsinger may argue that QPUs will outshine GPUs before 2030, but researchers highlighted by The Quantum Insider push a subtler picture: a hierarchy where classical compute remains the backbone, AI does the steering, and quantum steps in as a precision scalpel for the hardest bottlenecks. Quantum doesn’t sack classical; it specializes it.

Platforms like NVIDIA’s CUDA‑Q and IBM’s quantum‑centric workflows now let you write a single application that feels classical, while under the hood certain kernels are dispatched to QPUs on the cloud. SAS, working with D‑Wave, IBM, and QuEra, is already running hybrid optimization where only the nastiest parts of a supply chain model go quantum, then flow back into classical analytics.

That’s today’s most interesting quantum‑classical hybrid solution: a layered organism, not a replacement. Classical silicon for breadth, AI for adaptation, quantum for depth.

Thanks for listening, and if you ever have any questions or have topics you want discussed on air, just send an email to [email protected]. Don’t forget to subscribe to Quantum Computing 101. This has been a Quiet Please Production, and for more information you can check out quiet please dot AI.

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This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI