Alphabet shares rise 5% after Google touts breakthrough quantum chip

alphabet shares rose 5% in trading Tuesday, a day after the company hailed its latest quantum computing chip as a “breakthrough.”

Google’s parent company Monday revealed “Willow,” a quantum computing chip that the company said performed significantly better on a quantum computing benchmark than its predecessor in 2019. Willow, like similar quantum chips, uses uncertain “qubits” to represent numbers instead of transistors, which are used in traditional semiconductors. Google said its technology can reduce expected errors faster than they appear as quantum chips get bigger, which has been a bottleneck in the development of better quantum computers.

Willow is the second milestone in a six-step strategy to develop quantum computers that can perform useful applications, Google said. The chip has about 100 qubits, but Google plans to build a system with 1 million qubits.

“Willow brings us closer to running practical and commercially relevant algorithms that cannot be replicated on conventional computers,” Google wrote in a blog post, adding that the experiment is evidence suggesting that reality is made up of parallel universes them

“We see Willow as an important step in our journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical applications in areas such as drug discovery, fusion energy, battery design and more,” Sundar Pichai, Google CEO. said to X.

When quantum computing matures, it is expected to be useful for large-scale simulations and code-breaking, but this may not be possible for years or decades. Google isn’t the only tech giant working on quantum computing. Nvidia, Microsoft i IBM they are also working on the technology, in addition to researchers from startups and universities.

Google’s announcement was praised on social media by several figures in the tech business, among them Tesla CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“One day we should make a quantum cluster in space with Starship,” Pichai replied Musk.