Rigetti shares jump: it has belatedly launched sales of a quantum computer

Quotes of Rigetti Computing, which deals with quantum computing, jumped 5% on April 8. The company - albeit a few months late - announced that it was launching its most powerful quantum computer yet.

Rigetti's stock rose 5% to $14.5 in trading on Wednesday, April 8. On Tuesday evening, the company announced the start of sales of a new quantum system Cepheus-1-108Q, the largest in the refluxing industry

Rigetti calls it the largest in the industry and the most powerful system in its lineup in terms of the number of qubits - which is the smallest unit of information in a quantum computer.

Rigetti originally planned to release the Cepheus-1-108Q as early as late 2025, but said in January that it was delaying because it needed more time to improve the system's accuracy. IBM's and IQM's products have comparable accuracy rates, "so Rigetti really needs to reduce the error rate to be more competitive," Rosenblatt investment firm analyst John McPeak wrote at the time. He first rated Rigetti's stock in January, recommending buying it.

After the refinements, the accuracy of the dual-cube gates, a measure of computing quality, is 99.1%, and the company plans to increase it to 99.5% by the end of the year, according to a press release.

The Cepheus-1-108Q is available to customers and partners through Rigetti's quantum cloud platform, as well as through Amazon Braket, a quantum computing service from Amazon Web Services. This is especially important for continued growth in commercial sales, Barron's notes.

Since the beginning of the year, quotes of Rigetti collapsed by 34%. The dynamics is largely explained by the general sentiment in the stock market due to the conflict in the Middle East, says Barron's.

The publication predicts that the catalyst for the growth of securities may be the expected growth of financial performance in the first quarter - thanks to the sale of one of Rigetti's quantum computers to the Canadian University of Saskatchewan. For 2025, the company reported a 35% drop in revenue to $7 million.

Barron's, meanwhile, reminds us that Wall Street has criticized Rigetti for its reliance on federal funding, a fact some analysts say limits its growth potential in the short term.

The company's securities have a total of ten "buy" ratings from Wall Street analysts, two "hold" and one "sell" rating. The average target price is $32.1, which implies the potential growth of quotations more than twice relative to the closing level on April 8.