D-Wave Quantum suffered a significant hit to its stock price alongside other publicly listed quantum computing companies after the founder and CEO of chip giant Nvidia, Jensen Huang, expressed a pessimistic outlook on the sector.
“There is more than one approach to building a quantum computer.”
Alan Baratz
D-Wave
D-Wave, a Canadian-founded, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)-listed company, opened the market on Tuesday trading at a price of $10.47 USD per share, but just after the market closed, Huang told the audience of a Nvidia financial analyst Q&A session at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas that the quantum market is about 20 years away from being “very useful.”
“If you said 15 years [away] for very useful quantum computers, that would probably be on the early side, if you said 30 [years] that would probably be on the late side,” Huang said. “If you said 20 years, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it.”
The stock prices of quantum companies such as IonQ, Rigetti Computing, Quantum Computing Inc, and D-Wave tumbled on Wednesday in the wake of Huang’s comments. In D-Wave’s case, the company opened the market trading at $5.63 USD per share, going as low as $4.88 USD per share.
In response, D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz asserted in a LinkedIn post that Huang has a “misunderstanding of quantum,” adding that, while the founder and CEO of the second-largest company in the world might be right about other quantum companies, he is “dead wrong” about D-Wave.
“There is more than one approach to building a quantum computer,” Baratz wrote in a LinkedIn post. “D-Wave took a different approach, which has allowed us to become commercial today and likely many years ahead of other quantum computing companies.”
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Baratz also appeared on CNBC to defend his company’s work in the quantum computing sector, where he clarified that Huang may be right about the gate-based approach to quantum computing being decades away, but D-Wave’s annealing approach is being deployed today.
“We are not 30 years out, we’re not 20 years out, we’re not 15 years out,” Baratz said in the interview. “We are today. We are supporting businesses today with quantum compute to solve their hard problems.”
D-Wave raised $175 million USD ($246 million CAD) in gross proceeds through a stock sale near the end of 2024 to fuel its technical development efforts and business operations.
After battling to keep its share price above $1.00 USD per share for most of 2024, the raise contributed to a significant share-price bump that coincided with Google announcing it had made a breakthrough quantum computing chip. According to CNBC, D-Wave shares rose by 178 percent in December as a result of the renewed investor interest, before being brought back down this week.
Following its recent reckoning, D-Wave’s stock price has seen a slight recovery, but is still a fraction of its value before Huang’s comments, trading at $6.10 USD per share as of market close on Thursday.
Feature image courtesy Nvidia.