By Hamza in Quantum Weekly — Mar 16, 2026

Quantum #103

Issue #103 of the weekly HPC newsletter by HMx Labs. Nvidia GTC dominates of course but we get a quantum supercomputing reference architecture from IBM to read while AI eats all the infrastructure it can get its hands on, including your CPUs now.

Its GTC this week, so with the best will in the world and as much as I’d like to focus on HPC any news is going to be focused around Nvidia and the AI monster. This kicked off already with Nvidia inflating its circular financial model with investment into Nebius, though it’s a relatively modest $2billion. The number go up analysts are already expecting Nvidia to announce further developments to improve its inference capability in a market that is rapidly providing other options. I guess we will have to see what uncle Jensen is able to pull out of his hat post the acquisition of Groq. All this before Vera Rubin has even hit the racks.

IBM gave us a reference architecture for quantum in supercomputing. I’m not sure how many are in a position to run production grade workloads on a quantum machine yet, but I guess it’s good to be ahead of the curve here.

In case your budgets were not stretched thin enough by the jump in RAM prices due to the AI monster devouring everything it can get its hands on, CPU prices are now headed in the same direction as the beast tries to quench its insatiable appetite for compute. You didn’t want to buy any new hardware this year, did you? Beowulf clusters and running systems beyond EOL here we come! 🏴‍☠️