Shares in Google's parent company Alphabet soared as much as 6% on Tuesday after the company hinted at major advances with its new quantum computing chip, Willow.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the Willow chip would take about 10 billion years, or “far beyond the age of the universe,” for current “state-of-the-art supercomputers” to solve problems. It is said that this problem can be solved in less than 5 minutes.
“We see Willow as an important step in our journey to build useful quantum computers with practical applications in areas such as drug discovery, fusion energy, and battery design. ” Pichai said in a post on X.
The Willow chip takes less than five minutes to solve a problem that would take today's most advanced supercomputers about 1 billion years to solve. GOOGLE/AFP (via Getty Images)
Alphabet stock hit its highest price since July due to the stock rally.
Google's stock price has been under pressure in recent months as investors worry that Google could go bankrupt as part of a landmark antitrust lawsuit targeting the online search empire.
Pichai's announcement impressed billionaire Elon Musk, who responded, “Wow.”
“Someday we should use starships to create quantum clusters in space :),” Pichai replied.
Musk has his own artificial intelligence startup, xAI, which competes with Google and is a major customer of chip supplier Nvidia.
He is also the founder of SpaceX, which manufactures the space shuttle Starship and the satellite internet service Starlink.
Quantum computers use subatomic quantum bits, or “qubits,” to process data much faster than traditional binary computers.
Qubits are known to be error-prone, so Google and other competitors have been looking for ways to make their devices more reliable.
Google didn't include any specific examples of Willow's applications in the blog post detailing the breakthrough.
But the company said Willow “can reduce errors exponentially as you scale up with more qubits” and “can solve important challenges in quantum error correction.”
Although mainstream adoption may take several years, the technology is expected to play a key role in the development of advanced AI systems.
“Willow represents an important step toward the eventual commercialization of quantum computing, with the potential to have profound implications for many industries, not just data and national security,” Baird's analyst said. Liszt's Colin Sebastian said of this announcement: According to Bloomberg.
