Pichai Forecast: Quantum Computing Will Reach ‘Breathless Excitement’ in Five Years

With the rapid debut of Gemini 3, Nano Banana Pro, and other AI offerings, Google’s momentum in the field shows no sign of slowing. In a recent episode of the Google AI: Release Notes podcast, CEO Sundar Pichai joined host and Google AI Studio product lead Logan Kilpatrick for a far-reaching conversation.

In the interview, Pichai not only reflected on Google’s decade-long transformation into an “AI-first” company, but also made bold predictions about the future. He believes quantum computing will, within five years, reach a moment of “breathless excitement” comparable to what AI is experiencing today.

Pichai revealed that Google set its AI-first strategy as early as 2016. The decision was fueled by the momentum generated from Google Brain’s famous 2012 “cat face recognition” paper and the foundational advances brought by DeepMind after its acquisition in 2014 — culminating in AlphaGo’s historic victory in 2016.

Less widely known is that Google also announced the first-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) in May of the same year. Pichai emphasized that this represented a full-stack wager — an investment covering everything from low-level infrastructure, data centers, and TPU/GPU chips to high-level models and product applications. It took years of stacking these components before Google was prepared to respond so swiftly to the explosion of generative AI.

Discussing the newly launched Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro image generator, Pichai said the most inspiring aspect is seeing how these technologies unlock people’s latent creativity. He noted how users now express themselves in ways shaped by their own imagination, with Nano Banana Pro proving especially impressive in producing infographics.

Pichai also expressed high expectations for the upcoming Gemini 3.0 Flash model, calling it potentially Google’s “best model yet,” one that could bring AI services to an even broader audience.

Looking beyond today’s AI competition, Pichai has his sights set on the next frontier. He predicts, “I think in about five years we will feel the same breathless excitement about quantum computing that we feel about AI today.” This suggests that Google views quantum computing as the next paradigm shift following AI.

He also made an unexpected reference to Project Suncatcher, announced two weeks ago — an audacious plan to deploy data centers in space by 2027.
Though seemingly fantastical, Pichai argued that once one considers the scale of computational power the future will demand, the idea becomes far more reasonable. He even joked that space-based TPUs might one day encounter the Tesla Roadster currently drifting in orbit.

The discussion also touched on the idea of Vibe Coding — enabling people without traditional programming backgrounds to build software through AI-assisted creation. Pichai shared an internal anecdote: a member of Google’s communications team used Gemini 3 to generate an animated HTML page in a single attempt, which he then used to teach his son Spanish verb conjugations.

To Pichai, this exemplifies AI’s capacity to empower individuals.

From the broad deployment of Gemini to the vision of data centers in space, Google is clearly striving to shape the second act of the AI revolution through a lens focused not just on today, but on the decades ahead.

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