(Reuters) – Quantum computing stocks fell on Wednesday, pausing a year-long rally after Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said practical applications of the technology may be two decades away.
The long wait for what Huang outlined as a “very useful quantum computer” pours cold water on an industry that had expected to spend millions on the technology, which has so far only been able to perform niche calculations.
“If you say 15 years… it might be earlier. If you say 30 years, it might be later. But if you say 20 years, I think a lot of us will believe it,” he told investors on Tuesday. said at the meeting.
Shares of Rigetti Computing and Quantum Computing were each down more than 17% in premarket trading, while IonQ and D-Wave Quantum were down 9.4% and 14%, respectively.
If losses continue, these companies will collectively lose about $3 billion in market value.
Shares of all companies have risen at least threefold in the past year, driven by eye-catching breakthroughs from Alphabet Inc’s Google and growing computing demands from generative artificial intelligence applications.
Google in December launched a new generation of chips that it said could solve a computing problem in five minutes that would take conventional computers longer than the history of the universe, triggering a rise in its stock price.
In April 2024, Microsoft and Quantinuum said they had taken a key step toward making quantum computers a commercial reality, but did not comment on how many years it would take to use the technology to defeat conventional supercomputers.
(Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D’Silva)
