Key Points

  • Alphabet shares rose Tuesday after the company’s unveiling of “Willow,” its latest quantum computing chip.
  • When quantum computing matures, it is expected to be useful for large-scale simulations and code breaking, but that may not be possible for years or decades.
  • Google’s announcement was praised on social media by several technology business figures, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
cnbc.com

Alphabet
Shares rose 6% on Tuesday, a day after the company praised its latest quantum computing chip as a “breakthrough.”

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

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

“Willow brings us closer to running practical, 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.

“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,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. in X.

When quantum computing matures, it is expected to be useful for large-scale simulations and code breaking, but that may not be possible for years or decades. Google is not the only tech giant working on quantum computing. NVIDIA
, microsoft
and IBM
In addition to researchers from startups and universities, they also work in technology.

Google’s announcement was praised on social media by several figures in the technology sector, including Tesla.
CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“Someday we should create a quantum cluster in space with Starship,” Pichai responded to Musk.