Quantum shares like Rigetti fall after Nvidia’s Huang says computers are 15 to 30 years away

Quantum computing shares fell on Wednesday after that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that useful quantum computers are many years from now.

“If you were to say 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that would probably be at the very beginning,” he said during Nvidia’s analyst day. “If you said 30, it’s probably too late. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it.”

Huang said he believes Nvidia will play a “very significant role” in building computers and help the industry “get there as quickly as possible.”

Shares related to quantum computing tumbled following the comments, with Discards calculations plunging 40%, so far IonQ strait by more than 32%. D-Wave Quantum decreased by more than 38%, while Art ETF Defiance Quantum & AI decreased by 5%. Quantum computingwhich announced an initial public offering to raise $100 million, fell 39%.

At the end of 2024, the sector experienced significant growth as the hype around quantum computing exploded after Google unveiled its latest Willow chip, which it says has done better than its 2019 predecessor in reducing errors. Many investors also hoped that the sector would become the next big tech craze following the rise of artificial intelligence after ChatGPT.

The excitement lifted stocks at the end of the year, with Rigetti and D-Wave up 1,449% and 854%, respectively.

Proponents of quantum computing say that this technology will be able to perform computational tasks that ordinary computers cannot perform and process much larger amounts of data.

But there are many investors warned that it may be too soon to eliminate real sector winners and real-world use cases for the technology.