Quantum computing stocks sank on Wednesday, pausing a year-long upturn, after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the technology’s practical use was likely two decades away during a CES 2025 keynote.
The long wait outlined by Huang for “very useful quantum computers” has hit the breaks on a sector that was already expected to spend millions more on the technology, which can only perform niche calculations so far. “If you kind of said 15 years… that’d probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it’s probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it,” he said.
Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum, Quantum Computing and IonQ all fell more than 40%. The companies, in total, were set to lose more than $8 billion in market value. The four quantum computing stocks rose at least threefold in 2024 and outperformed a more than twofold rise in Nvidia shares, thanks to a high-profile breakthrough in the technology at Google in December 2024.
The technology is seen as a key national security undertaking, with countries counting on it to drive decryption for military purposes. IonQ, valued at more than $10 billion as of Tuesday, is expected to generate revenue of $41.6 million for fiscal 2024, according to data compiled by LSEG. Rigetti, which had a market cap of about $4.4 billion based on Tuesday’s close, is likely to bring in annual revenue of $11 million for 2024.
“There will be considerable government-related revenues in the next few years”, Craig-Hallum analyst Richard Shannon said to Reuters. “If investors are worried about minimal revenues that will require dilution, they are missing a key part of the equation. Quantum computing will be disruptive to parts of the classical compute business, of which Nvidia is a chief beneficiary”.
Image Credit: Nvidia