Key Points

  • Alphabet shares rose Tuesday after the company unveiled “Willow,” its latest quantum computing chip.
  • Alphabet shares rose Tuesday after the company unveiled “Willow,” its latest quantum computing chip.
  • Google’s announcement was praised on social media by several tech figures, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
cnn.com

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

Google’s parent company on Monday unveiled “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 larger, 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 perform 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 can’t 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 like drug discovery, fusion energy, battery design, and more,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on 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 isn’t the only tech giant working on quantum computing. Nvidia
, Microsoft
and IBM
are also working on the technology, in addition to researchers at startups and universities.

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

“We should do a quantum cluster in space with Starship someday,” Pichai told Musk.