Intel to buy quantum firm Classiq for about $2.3 billion, Bloomberg News reports

JUST IN: Intel to buy quantum computing firm Classiq for about $2.3 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Intel is buying quantum firm Classiq for about 2.3 billion dollars. That's per Bloomberg, and if it holds, it's one of the biggest quantum deals ever written.

Quick context. Intel has spent the last couple of years getting lapped in the AI chip race while Nvidia prints money, and you can see the company's Santa Clara campus here. Quantum is the one frontier where nobody's crowned a winner yet, and Classiq builds the software layer, the tools that let people actually write programs for quantum machines without a physics PhD.

So this is Intel paying up to skip the queue. Here's CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who's been promising a turnaround since he took the job, and 2.3 billion dollars is him saying it out loud with money. For a company that's been cutting costs everywhere else, that's a loud number.

The tell here is simple. Intel stopped trying to win yesterday's race and just bought a ticket to the next one.

This is Angel Manalo, reporting for HIT.