Quantum computing stocks soar after Nvidia unveils Ising AI model family
Quantum computing stocks spiked during Tuesday's trading day / Photo: LinkedIn / Xanadu
Shares of quantum computing companies surged 11-29% on Tuesday after NVIDIA announced the launch of its Ising family of AI models designed to help build quantum processors.
Details
Shares of quantum computing companies were among the top gainers on Tuesday, Business Insider writes, linking the rally to Nvidia’s unveiling of Ising – an open-source family of AI models. The models are designed to help researchers and enterprises build quantum processors capable of running useful applications, the chipmaker said.
Shares of Canada-based Xanadu Quantum Technologies, which only went public at the end of March via a merger with a SPAC, jumped 29% on Tuesday to an all-time high of $14.23 per share. In early trading on Wednesday, they are up another 23% as of this writing.
Shares of IonQ surged 20% on Tuesday to $35.80 apiece and are rising about 6% in early trading on Wednesday. There was another driver behind the move, the Motley Fool noted. On Tuesday, the company said it had reached a key milestone in the development of photonic interconnects. The project is partially funded by the U.S. government, the press release said.
Shares of D-Wave Quantum climbed nearly 16% on Tuesday to $17.00 per share and are up 8% in early trading on Wednesday. On Tuesday, D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz said in an interview with Yahoo Finance: “if I was Nvidia, I’d be shaking in my boots.” He was referring to the fact that the chipmaker’s GPUs consume significantly more energy than the company’s own systems.
Shares of Rigetti Computing rose 11.5% on Tuesday to $16.87 apiece and has added nearly 5% in early trading on Wednesday.
Implications
The Ising AI models are open source, meaning any developer can freely modify them, the Motley Fool wrote in a separate article.
Nvidia “just brought quantum-like computing to hardware already in existence that organizations have – allowing them to benefit with real business value now,” Ramsey Theory Group CEO Dan Herbatschek told Business Insider.
Ising is already being used by more than a dozen companies, including IonQ, according to the chipmaker’s press release.
“AI is essential to making quantum computing practical,” said Jensen Huang. “With Ising, AI becomes the control plane – the operating system of quantum machines – transforming fragile qubits to scalable and reliable quantum-GPU systems.”
Context
Over the last year and a half, the prospects for quantum computing have become the subject of intense debate. In January 2025, Huang said it could take 15-30 years for quantum technologies to become practically useful. That triggered a selloff in stocks in the segment.
Two months later, at Nvidia’s annual developer conference, Huang convened a panel with executives from quantum computing companies and said he had been wrong. “My first reaction was, ‘I didn’t know they were public! How could a quantum computer company be public?’” he said.
Around the same time, Peter Chapman, chair of IonQ, predicted a “ChatGPT moment” for the quantum sector in an interview with the Investor’s Business Daily. “If I was [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman five years ago, would I have spent even any energy trying to convince the world that AI is coming?” he said. “You could have had Sam Altman buck naked on a corner street in San Francisco with a sandwich board saying AI is coming, and no one would have listened.”
In late July last year, Satya Nadella said quantum technologies could accelerate cloud computing, which also drove a rally in quantum stocks.
The quantum computing market is expected to exceed $11 billion by 2030, up from $1.7 billion in 2024, Bloomberg reported, citing data from Stratistics Market Research Consulting.
