8th January 2025 – (New York) Shares in quantum computing companies fell dramatically on Wednesday, halting a year-long upward trend, following comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who stated that practical applications of the technology may still be two decades away.
Huang’s remarks at an investor conference indicated that the timeline for developing “very useful quantum computers” is longer than many had anticipated. He noted, “If you said 15 years… that’d probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it is probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it.”
In pre-market trading, shares of Rigetti Computing and Quantum Computing plummeted by over 17% each, while IonQ and D-Wave Quantum saw declines of 9.4% and 14%, respectively. Collectively, these companies faced a potential loss of approximately $3 billion in market value if these declines persist.
Despite last year’s surge in stock prices—each company seeing at least a threefold increase—this week’s downturn came amid rising concerns about the practical viability of quantum technology, which currently excels only at niche calculations. The previous year had been buoyed by a significant breakthrough from Alphabet-owned Google, which introduced a new chip that reportedly solved a complex problem in five minutes, a task that would take classical computers longer than the age of the universe.
Additionally, in April 2024, Microsoft and Quantinuum announced progress towards making quantum computers commercially viable, but did not specify how many years it might take to surpass the capabilities of conventional supercomputers.
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