Rigetti Computing stock price: Why shares took a quantum leap today

Shares in the quantum computing firm Rigetti Computing are experiencing what you might call quantum leap.

The Berkeley, California, company announced on Wednesday that it “has achieved its mid-year performance milestone of 99.5% median [two-qubit gate fidelity] on its modular 36-qubit system.”

What that means is that the company has managed to build the biggest modular quantum computer to date, and also cut its error rate in half—marking progress toward making quantum computers more viable for commercial users.

Investors appear to see the news as further evidence that practical quantum computing is right around the corner, rather than decades away, as some have suggested. Following the announcement, Rigetti stock (NASDAQ: RGTI) saw a significant increase, rising more than 30% as of Wednesday afternoon.

“We benefit from the many advantages of superconducting qubits, including gate speeds more than 1,000x faster than other modalities like ion trap and pure atoms, and scalability,” Rigetti CEO Subodh Kulkarni said in a statement. “By leveraging well-known techniques from the semiconductor industry, we’ve developed proprietary technology that we believe is critical to enable scaling to higher qubit count systems.

The company added that it plans to share additional updates when it releases its second-quarter 2025 operating results.

Quantum computing is having an eventful year

Even with AI sucking up the lion’s share of attention from investors this year, quantum computing—which involves complex processes that can carry out tasks far faster than classical computers—has not gone unnoticed, although there is debate over when and to what extent advances in the space will yield world-changing results.

Shares in the major publicly traded firms have remained somewhat volatile. With Rigetti’s stock boost today, the company is trading at around $16.57 a share—a more than six-month high, but still lower than they were during a rally of quantum-related stocks at the end of last year.

Other companies, such as Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, and Google are also in the quantum arms race, which could potentially lead to increased computing power on a massive scale, with a wide variety of potential use cases.

Some companies, for example, are using them to develop new materials or drugs on time scales that dwarf existing development cycles.

Quantum computing has remained largely theoretical until recently, but companies like Rigetti have been eager to share their developments backed by actual data.

In March, quantum computing company D-Wave announced that it had achieved “quantum supremacy.” The claim was challenged by researchers in Switzerland, but investors have rewarded D-Wave since then, particularly after the release of its Advantage2 system in May. Shares are up more than 191% over the last six months.