TMTPOST -- A host of quantum computing stocks took a double-digit hit after Nvidia Corporation CEO Jensen Huang saw the hyped technology would be no real useful in decades.

Credit: gmo-research.com

D-Wave Quantum sharets tumbled as much as 51.3% and finished 36.1% lower on Wednesday. Fellow stocks in the quantum computing sector, Rigetti Computing, IonQ and Quantum Computing shares plunged up to around 50% intraday and closed 45.5%, 43.3% and 39% lower, respectively.

During a question-and-answer session with analysts Tuesday at the CES 2025 tech show, Jensen Huang said quantum computing can't solve every problem. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that'd probably be on the early side. If you said 30 is probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it," Huang told analysts.

Huang expected "very simple quantum computers" could be two decade away even as Nvidia continued to bet on the technology. Huang said Nvidia works with "just about every quantum company" by extending its CUDA software to the quantum realm. "What we're interested in is we want to help the industry get there as fast as possible, and to create the computer of the future, and we'll be a very significant part of it," he said.

D-Wave Quantum CEO Alan Baratz refuted Huang's remark as quantum computing shares dived on Wednesday. Huang is "dead wrong" about the technology, Baratz told CNBC's Deirdre Bosa on "The Exchange", noting "the reason he's wrong is that we at D-Wave are commercial today."

Baratz said companies including Mastercard and Japan's NTT Docomo "are using our quantum computers today in production to benefit their business operations." "Not 30 years from now, not 20 years from now, not 15 years from now," Baratz said. "But right now today."

Quantum computers use quantum physics to access different computational abilities than classical computers. Quantum computing promises to solve problems that are difficult for current processors, such as decoding encryption, generating random numbers and large-scale simulations. Huang's commentary throw cold water on the frenzy of bets on quantum stocks, which have seen exponential rises these months, especially following Google's announcement of a quantum computing breakthrough with new chip dubbed Waymo.

Willow, a major step on a journey that Google began over a decade ago, has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements, Hartmut Neven, head of Google Quantum AI, announced in a blog post on December 9. The first achievement is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as Google scales up using more qubits, cracking a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years, Neven said.

Another achievement is that Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe. On the random circuit sampling (RCS) benchmark, a standard now widely used in the field, Willow performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years.

Over the past three months through Tuesday close, Quantum Computing and Rigetti Computing shares had each surged more than 2,000%. D-Wave Quantum's stock popped 942% in that period, while IonQ's gained 419%.