The “quantum chandelier” that sits within a glass box in the chapel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s campus in Troy, New York, is the symbolic centerpiece of an ambitious effort to turn upstate New York into an advanced technology center – what Silicon Valley is to social media or Cambridge, Massachusetts, is to biotech.
The silver sci-fi object, named for interior gold lattices that suspend, cool and isolate its processor, is the heart of a “quantum computing system” that could herald a new age of computing. It’s the centerpiece of the dream Curtis Priem, a co-founder of Nvidia, the $2.8tn artificial intelligence hardware and software company, has of turning Rensselaer, or RPI, into an advanced computing hub and refashioning this area of upstate New York into a new Silicon Valley.
Priem has invested a sizable chunk of his fortune into building the Curtis Priem Quantum Constellation – a workshop for RPI students’ vision of a quantum computing future. Just as his partners at Nvidia, where he was the company’s first chief technology officer, gave him the freedom to imagine graphics chip architecture that powers the AI revolution, he hoped his investment will spark a new era of computer-powered innovation in the region.
Priem is betting that the area along the Hudson Valley, from Yorktown Heights, home to IBM’s quantum lab, up to Troy, home to RPI and Suny’s NanoTech complex, and west to Syracuse, where Micron is building a $100bn megafab complex, is US computer technology’s future home.
To do so, he’s thinking beyond concerns about artificial intelligence, and the success of Nvidia’s H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) that underpin as much as 90% of generative AI systems.
Wall Street has turned more skeptical on tech. AI has lost billions as Wall Street has soured on the idea that the new technology is about to change the world. But the same was true for the internet overbuild in the 1990s, leading to a boom and crash, before finally paying off.
In theory, quantum technology will be able to solve in seconds problems that would take today’s supercomputer decades, if at all, unlocking secrets about the behavior of molecules, genetic codes, weather prediction and – the latest anxiety – breaking the encryption systems that underpin the internet.
The technical, and financial, challenges are mighty. Rensselaer’s IBM-built quantum computer is so advanced that it must be cooled to close to absolute zero, (−273.15C, −459.67F) to operate at all. To program a quantum computer is challenging, to say the least. Traditional computers work in a binary code of ones and zeros. Quantum mechanics is judged to be one of the most difficult areas of physics because values exist in multiple states at once. In a computer, quantum bits, or qubits, are “entangled”, meaning the properties of one depend on the properties around it.
For Priem, at 66, that means giving the febrile minds of Rensselaer’s sciences student body the freedom to imagine a new computing world. “It’s exciting to see these kids with no blinders and constraints put on them and given this technology that no one else has,” he says. “All of a sudden, they’re like, ‘Wow! I can invent the future.’”
The development comes as the US is racing to advance computer science and repatriate chip manufacturing from Taiwan and China as a matter of national security. The pandemic taught US manufacturers and consumers that supply chains are fragile. In 2022 Congress authorized the $280bn Chips Act to bring chip innovation back home and protect the US against future disruptions.
“We have to look at everything,” Priem says. “The whole thing can fall apart. We thought we were friendly with the Chinese and then it turned out that it depends on who our leaders are.”
Priem, Martin Schmidt, a former MIT provost who is now Rensselaer president, and Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, believe a good chunk of that cash should be directed to upstate New York, an area that has four essential qualities: land, water, power and an intellectual “brainbelt”.
AI is notoriously heavy in its demands for water and power: Goldman Sachs predicts that demand from US data centers will grow from 3% of energy usage today to 8% in six years. And then there’s demand for water needed to cool the chips.
Because Priem is known for the architecture that underpins AI, people inevitably ask him what he makes of it and whether they should be worried. He tells them that whatever is coming with AI, the experiment has already begun with social media.
“Only 1% of our existence is based on reality, and 99% on belief,” he reasons. “So you have people talking to each other on social media and that’s the mess AI will represent. The big companies try to detect what’s true and what’s fake, but when you look at social media you can’t tell.”
Artificial reality is OK for a Marvel movie where we accept fake as better than reality, but outside the theatre, he says, “everybody hates each other”.
Priem sold off most of his Nvidia stock when the company was valued at $2bn. It’s now worth $2.5tn. If he had not sold, he would now be one of the world’s wealthiest individuals. Former partner Jensen Huang’s stock was recently valued at $103bn – but even that is down from Nvidia’s June peak.
Priem doesn’t sound too disappointed. The stock he sold, he reasons, may have in turn helped a family buy a house or put their kids through college. He remains, he says, “Nvidia’s No 1 fan. The other founders played the game and I’m cheering them on from the stands.”
Divorce caused him to sell off his Nvidia stock, but he stays in touch with his former Nvidia partners, Huang and Chris Malachowsky. Priem says that at times it’s been awkward, but he texts, most recently when the Huang family dogs had diarrhea, and about their kids.
“All I can do is help from outside. The last shares I held were in 2006. It’s phenomenal what they would be worth, but I wouldn’t be able to monetize them without taking down Nvidia’s price,” he says.
The shares could receive a further boost this week when Nvidia announces second-quarter earnings. It is expected to reveal another surge in profits on the back of doubling revenues as it benefits from the rapid adoption of generative AI.
If Nvidia hits $210 a share, the three co-founders would be worth a trillion dollars. “Everybody thinks that’s how we value success because they have no other way of doing it,” he says, “but my $200bn is what I’ve infused into the US economy.”
“I’ve got to be one of the luckiest guys on the planet – what those guys did for me was to trust me to design this architecture (now called Cuda) for the GPU. I’ve never seen that level of trust in any other engineer in our industry,” Priem says. “I gave them the framework, the rules, and I’m a happy camper.” When he recently met Huang at a fundraiser at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Huang turned to him, shaking his head, to say, “I can’t believe we’re still using the same architecture.”
His time at Nvidia also gave him unrivaled contacts. Like most businesses, technology is one of relationships. Priem and Schmidt prevailed on IBM’s director of research, Darío Gil, to send over the quantum computer which might otherwise have been ground up. Gil and John Kelly, former head of IBM, sit on the board at Rensselaer. Among the big chiefs of technology, Priem says, “there’s a certain level of trust about how to do this stuff”.
Schmidt says it takes 40 years for a region to fully develop into a technology hub. It was true for MIT after James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of DNA in the 1950s opened up the field of molecular biology around Kendall Square. “Creating eco-systems creates a virtuous circle,” Schmidt says.
“The assets of this region lock into prototyping, packaging and EUV, or extreme ultraviolet, chip fabrication. What’s different about this technology is everyone has to share a fab – a fabrication plant – because no one can afford to have their own facility.”
The focus on turning upper New York state into a tech hub, he says, demands looking at what other areas are doing wrong. Silicon Valley, which started around Stanford University, has run out of space and is in any case now mostly focused on social media. San Francisco has quality-of-life issues. Taiwan’s TSMC is looking at Arizona, but the state lacks water. Another contender is central Ohio but it lacks workforce training.
“My goal is to teach New York politicians about what they have here,” he says. “They don’t even know they have a nanotech center. I don’t think there’s another state that can do this. But time is of the essence. Priem says he was a little disappointed when Hochul recently said she was interested in AI. “We were like, be careful because that’s almost old news.”
