Google CEO may have just reiterated the sentence that Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang said earlier this year that saw stocks of Quantum Computing companies tumbling. Many of these stocks had soared more than 1,000% last year.
According to a report in Bloomberg, speaking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, Pichai said that Quantum computers that are “practically useful” are 5-to-10 years away, comparing the groundbreaking technology to where artificial intelligence was about a decade ago.
“The quantum moment reminds me of where AI was in the 2010s, when we were working on Google Brain and the early progress,” Pichai said. Google CEO also cited a recent Google breakthrough in quantum chips, which allowed researchers to calculate in five minutes a problem that would take existing supercomputers “longer than our universe has been around.” “The progress in quantum is palpably exciting,” he said.
What Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said
During Nvidia’s analyst day at CES trade show in Las Vegas (US), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that “very useful” quantum computers are likely decades away and may take 15-30 years. He told analysts that quantum computers would need 1 million times the number of quantum processing units, called qubits, that they currently have. The statement sent shock waves, sending quantum stocks in a free fall. So much so that the selling frenzy even swept up companies based on their names: Quantum Corp, a data management company, gained more than 670% last year, only to drop about 60% so far in 2025. Quantum-Si Inc., a life science company developing protein sequencing platforms, nearly quadruped in the last two months of 2024.
Governments, led by the US and China, and corporations are pledging billions of dollars to quantum computing research in the pursuit of futuristic technology. Quantum computers dramatically increase the speed and capacity of data that can be processed, making it possible to model complex systems, more accurately predict the outcome of different scenarios and break current encryption systems.
The quantum computing sector has seen increased attention following Google’s December 2024 announcement of its Willow quantum chip breakthrough. Google said that it has completed a 100 qubit chip, marking the second of six steps in its strategy to build a quantum system with 1 million qubits. However, the technology is still mainly used for research, and there’s a debate about when it will come into its own.