In The Arena by TechArena - From Xcelerated Compute: Cambium Capital on Practical Quantum

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

VC David Moehring of Cambium Capital discusses AI infrastructure investment, quantum computing's future, and the path to practical quantum applications.

Welcome to Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host. Welcome in the arena. My name's Allison Klein. We're coming to you from the Accelerated Compute Conference. And this is a Data Insights episode, which means I'm with Janice Norowski. Hey, Janice, how are you doing? Hi, Allison. I'm doing well. It's good to be here. So Quantum is the rule of the day, and we've got another fantastic interview lined up. Why don't you give me a sense of who you brought with you today? I know. It's like, so much quantum. I don't know what to do with it, but it's awesome. I actually have David Maureen, who is general partner of Cambium, and was a former CEO. We'll just leave it at that, but welcome to the program. It's good to be here. So David, Cambian Capital obviously has a great name in

terms of driving innovative investment. Tell me a little bit about your background in the industry and what you're doing with Cambian Capital. Yeah, so my background in the industry started in academia. I did a PhD in atomic and optical physics and quantum computing, kind of went down academic track for a while, ended up at Sandia National Labs as a staff member in the Department of Energy Lab in Albuquerque, and ran a couple of different projects there and microfibricated silicon devices, and then got pulled into the federal government, where I was a program manager for about five years and funded kind of all things around advanced quantum computing, especially hardware and kind of all the different paradigms that you're probably talking to some of the other people here today about.

So I was there for about five years. I ran kind of a worldwide portfolio of quantum computing. Did a little other work in the advanced computing world. But like most of the ARPAs DARPA, others, AIARPA is a term limited position. And when I left there, I left the government. I was the founding CEO of IonQ and ran that company for the first two years, helped it spend out of the University of Maryland and Duke,

where the two co-founders were from. And then ran that company for the first couple of years, is why we built out the first prototypes. But for the last eight years, I've been with KM Capital, that's early stage venture capital fund that does advanced computing hardware investing. And as part of that team, I'm more on the academic side, but my colleagues come from a mixture of industry.

One of my colleagues, Bill, was 30 years of Intel. Landon comes from a mixture of CFA charter and kind of investment banking, but also doing kind of like software, algorithms, application development. We all have very different backgrounds. long-winded way of answering the question. But from the Cambian perspective, I do more of the kind of nerdy, low-level science, especially, academic spouts. Got it. Brilliant. So you've got a brilliant background, brilliant mindset. How has advanced computing really helped shape your perspective? Yeah. So the background that

we just talked about the different kind of industry and academic and government experiences has been very interesting because they all have different goals at the end of the day. You know, academia, The government lab, especially like funding academic research, is very different than the venture capital world. And I found it like very useful to kind of understand the motivations of all of these different parts of the ecosystem and bring a lot of that to how we look at investing, both in advanced classical computing, but quantum computing as well. In the government, you're there to kind of fund the best research. And a lot of the strategic advantage for the government is to understand what's out there. Whereas in the venture capital world, you obviously, especially in me, I'm interested in funding good research and good research and development and products, but also, you know, we have to make money.

That's the nature of venture capital, which is why having the different background experiences that I've had, I think helps me look at the companies that we do diligence on from a different perspective than somebody who's only been in the financial world or somebody who's only been in the startup world or the academic world. Very cool. Got it. When you look at, I'm just going to give back up a little bit because I know we're getting into quantum in a bit, but I wanted to just talk a little bit about Cambian Capital's broader purview. And one of the things that you're working on is investments around improving the TCO of AI data centers. Can you talk a little bit about what your approach is and where you see the opportunity? Yeah. So, I mean, we've always invested across the compute ecosystem as a whole. And it's not always really well defined, but what is across the ecosystem, there's improvements to be made in many different places. So there's improvements to be made in the sort of chips themselves like in videos obviously they make incredible GPUs but if you want to do a very

specific job for very specific inference workload you might want to have something that's more perform it and then like how do I provide power to that chip we have companies that we're looking at and part of our portfolio and like power delivery movement of data embedded memories packaging kind of everything across the ecosystem and what's interesting is there's not really one like really big shortcoming. It's what we see and what we try to invest in is how do we move all of those forward? Because if you move just one of them forward, everything else is still backed up. I mean, you can build one mile more of an extra lane in the highway, but it'll still neck back down a mile later. So like how do you make sure you build the entire ecosystem, not just push

one piece forward? It was interesting, especially like from my old academic world, a lot of people are like truly like best in the world at very specific parts of the ecosystem, but they don't really see across, you know, what are the other pieces that need to be realized to allow them to unlock the potential of their one specific kind of niche? And what we try very hard at Cambium, and part of the reason we have such a diverse group of folks that do the investments as part of our team is we all come to the problems from a different perspective. So we understand the pieces that the other ones don't. When you look at today's AI infrastructure right, from memory to networking to GPUs, where do you see the biggest?

inefficiencies across drivers in the stack today? Yeah, so I was handing at that a little bit before that there's, I don't think there's one biggest inefficiency. It's really like an amalgamation of everything. There's a lot of buzz right now in March of 2026 around like optical movement of data. I was just at the OFC conference in Los Angeles last week and we have one investment in that space, but I think there's a lot of other investments to be made in that space because there's a lot of innovation that can bring higher connectivity, higher speed connectivity within devices across devices, and data centers really driving a lot of that demand.

Power is obviously another really big and important feature. Everybody's kind of talking about power, and a lot of people talk about data centers with regards to how many megawatts or gigawatts as opposed to like the actual computing power within it. And I think part of that reason is because power itself is such in high demand, like how to use service all of that demand from the customer's point of view. So a lot of what we're looking at as well is how do you make the power efficiency higher?

Like how does it get delivered to the data center itself? But then once it's in the data center, how do you get it to the workhorse, the GPU or the XPU, you know, the high performance chip at the core of the data center and inference computation that's happening? So when you think about the conversations you're having with startups, what are the key things that you're looking for from startups that really make you know that they can deliver discrete value and have differentiated return versus other startups in the space. Yeah. So obviously deep technical knowledge in the field in which they're focused. The hardware is hard and there's a lot of background knowledge that's required to push things forward.

And not everybody can do everything, but you at least need to understand where it fits in some of the questions you're asking earlier about like how do you look at the entire data center TCO as an ecosystem, you just can't have your one good technology and toss it over the fence and think other people are going to integrate it. So you need to be very deeply technical in your field, but you also need to really understand where it comes in. You just can't say, I'm going to do inference. It's like inference for what? Like for self-driving cars, for some edge devices for larger scale AI. These are very different devices. So you need to have a good understanding of not just what you're building, but how it fits into the ecosystem. So we spend a lot of our time

in our diligence, not just understanding can that technology work, but can that technology fit into the larger ecosystem? Sure. You remain super connected and focused on the quantum ecosystem, right? Both through your experience in helping build ion Q and through your role as chairman of 55 North, which is focused on investing in quantum computing technologies. From that vantage point, how do you see quantum computing evolving within the broader advanced computing landscape? Yeah, so I mean, I have a lot of background and passion and love for quantum, obviously. And I think in the panel tomorrow that I'm moderating, there's the question that's, is it two years away or is it 20 years away? And it's interesting because it's like it could be faster or it could be longer. But I am a true believer in that it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when. And it's not that if you make quantum computers, then classical computers or GPUs will go away because they really solve very different problems.

So as part of the overall computing, advanced computing ecosystem, there are jobs that just cannot be done by classical computing, no matter how powerful NVIDIA or other kind of special purpose compute hardware. Instead of NVIDIA, I should have set our portfolio companies, but obviously I'm biased in some of those. But how can you solve certain jobs with quantum computers very different than what you would do with classical in the same way that a GPU or an XPU is different than a CPU? it'll solve different set of problems that just aren't possible or way less efficient to do with a non-quantam device. So as mentioned earlier, we made a couple of investments from the Cambium point of view, but we're really going like heavier into that, the collective we into this new fund called 55 North that launched last year, started to make a couple of the first investments are publicly acknowledged

already, like IQM, Kutra. In Fenland and Germany, there's a couple of other investments that have been made more recently that aren't publicly stated yet. But, you know, the vision there is to, there's still a lot of hardware development that is needed, not just for the quantum processor itself, but the ecosystem, how do you build the laser systems that control atomic qubits?

How do you build the cryogenic systems that control superconducting cubit systems? So that fund is not just building and investing in the flashy, like most high-profile parts of the quantum ecosystem, but really like the underlying technology of how can that fund invest and build out the entire ecosystem, push it all forward, so it can achieve those kind of unique quantum aspects that you asked about. You talked about two and 20 years.

I guess one question that I have is when you talk to people, do they have any misconceptions about where we are with quantum? And what do you think is the reality? Oh, boy, that's a harder question. I know. I asked the ringers. Yeah, I don't like my exceedingly strong opinions to be on camera sometimes. But there's a lot of misunderstanding of quantum.

It's obviously a very confusing counterintuitive in many cases. I mean, just quantum physics in and of itself is counterintuitive. And a lot of really smart, great, smart, way smarter than me, physicists still struggle with some of the rules. My PhD advisor said that you don't have to understand why, but you have to understand what. Like, what are the results of these rules? And if you understand how the rules instantiate themselves in the computing world, then you can actually use them.

But there's a lot of people that don't that will say silly things around quantum. And, you know, it leads to a lot of misunderstandings. So there's a lot of misconstrued knowledge out there and talk to the experts. I enjoyed my timing in the government where we got to focus on not trying to sell, but really trying to develop more so than ever.

But as I said earlier, I am a very long-term believer in quantum. Thanks. So looking at AI infrastructure and quantum computing technologies, Do you see these as largely separate tracks, or could there eventually be a meaningful overlap and conversion of this long-term computing landscape? I sort of answered part of that question earlier, but not entirely. I mean, classical computing and quantum or quantum and non-quantum computing will solve very different problems in the long run. So in that sense, they'll develop in parallel.

Another part of the answer is that you will need classical computers to control quantum computers. So like the error correction, and I saw the jrower. gentleman, you were interviewing right before me as a lot of really deep knowledge in like, how do you do air correction, how do you optimize for active optimization and even passive optimization of air suppression. But the last part that I think is less talked about, but is definitely something that we look at from the 55 North VC fund perspective is there's a lot of technology that actually pushes both classical, like the underlying enabling technology that enables both classical and quantum computing. So a lot of like the laser sources, a lot of

materials, science, that is still kind of groundbreaking research and development that will enable classical computing will also enable quantum computing. So I think like the sort of problems that they solve are very different. The sort of timescales by which they're deployed can be quite different as well, but some of the enabling technologies are actually one and the same. So I think there's some places where it's very divergent, some places where it's very close. Awesome. Now I'm going to go future scaping again with you and just say if you're looking up five to ten years. What do you think are the first signs that were on the path to practical implementation of quantum in a commercial setting? Yeah. So we, and again, the collective weed, not just the 55

North Fund, but even the folks at Cambiam are really strong believers in that the first demonstration is kind of the canary in the cool mind, if you will, are around simulations of other quantum systems. And a lot of those are like kind of biopharmaceutical systems. And we strongly believe that's where you're going to see first real kind of advantage from quantum. And this is why we're so excited that Noval Holdings is one of the anchor investors in 55 North is because they're not just good kind of investors and partners. They're also very interested users. And the other reason that we like them and IFO, who's the other anchor investor, they have a very long-term perspective.

They're not trying to flip companies. They're trying to develop quantum for the long term because they agree with us that these first applications are well aligned. what we believe is also well-lined with what they're interested in. I mean, there's a lot of other things that are stated. I won't go through the list about where quantum can help. Some of them we do believe, and some of them we think are just talking heads that are saying stuff that sounds good, but they don't know any better.

Got it. This has been a fascinating discussion. Speaking of talking heads and don't know anything about it, but where can our listeners go to speak with you and get more information? You can find on our website at canvm.v.c. the Quantum Fund 55N.bc. You can find us on LinkedIn or just retail. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show today, David.

It's pleasure. And I'm right. Another episode of Data Insights. Again, thank you, Janice, for being here with me. Thanks so much for the great discussion today. Yes. Thank you, Allison. Thanks for joining Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, Techorina.a.i.

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