Google’s quantum leap sends shares soaring
Solving a problem that would take today’s best supercomputers 10 septillion years is worth at least a few tens of billions of dollars.
That’s the not-so-early verdict from traders on Alphabet’s alleged quantum-computing breakthrough, with the company saying its Willow quantum chip ran a complex computation in under five minutes.
Though Google announced the news yesterday, the stock didn’t really get much of a bid amid the meltdown in momentum stocks. But the stock is the best premarket performer in the S&P 500 on Tuesday, up nearly 4% as of 8:40 a.m. ET.
Introducing Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field. In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in <5 mins that would…
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) December 9, 2024
Other stocks in the quantum-computing biz — like IonQ, D-Wave Quantum, Quantum Computing, and Rigetti Computing — are selling off on Alphabet’s mic-drop moment.
After demonstrating the power of this fully armed and operational computer station, Alphabet plans “to step into the realm of algorithms that are beyond the reach of classical computers and that are useful for real-world, commercially relevant problems.”
