Rigetti, IonQ shares plummet as Nvidia CEO says ‘useful’ quantum computing is decades away
Rigetti Computing (RGTI), IonQ (IONQ) and other quantum computing stocks fell more than 40% on Wednesday, after Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang told Wall Street analysts that “very useful quantum computers” may be 20 years away.
As of 2:12:21 p.m. ET. The market is open.
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Rigetti calculated a drop of more than 49%, and IonQ dropped 47%. Fellow stocks in the sector, D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) and Quantum Computing (QUBT), plunged 48% and 50%, respectively.
As of 2:12:21 p.m. ET. The market is open.
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“Quantum computing can’t solve every problem,” Huang said in response to a question from Evercore ISI analyst Mark Lipacis at the technology industry’s annual CES trade show in Las Vegas.
“If you think it will take 15 years for a very useful quantum computer, that’s probably early days. If you say 30 it’s probably too late. But if you pick 20, I think a lot of us would believe it,” he said.
Quantum computing stocks experienced sharp gains in late November and throughout December as growing interest in quantum computing and technological advances fueled bets that the technology would take off sooner or later.
In November last year, Amazon launched a quantum computing consulting program and stated in the announcement that the program will help AWS customers “prepare for quantum computing.” IonQ said on November 18 that it had successfully run Nvidia’s quantum computing development kit on its hardware. The quantum computing company said it has taken stock of advanced chips to improve its quantum software.
On December 3, U.S. senators from both parties proposed a bill to reauthorize the National Quantum Initiative Act of 2018 and commit an additional $2.7 billion to quantum computing research to develop practical applications. The U.S. government is very interested in this emerging industry. Express approval. Then, on December 9, Google unveiled a new quantum computing chip called Willow, and the company said it had found a way to increase the chip’s power while reducing some of the problems associated with the technology (usually , the more powerful the chip) the more error-prone a quantum computer is).
Despite Wednesday’s sharp decline, Quantum Computing is still up nearly 1,400% from six months ago, while Rigetti is up more than 850%, D-Wave has soared 360% and IonQ is up 265% in that period.
Although Huang believes the technology will take longer to reach practical applications, Nvidia is still betting on it. Huang said Nvidia is working with “almost every quantum computing company.” Nvidia will begin expanding its CUDA software development kit (currently used by developers to develop artificial intelligence applications) for quantum software developers in 2022.
