Fans of quantum computing stocks are no doubt familiar with quantum computing unit (QCU) maker Rigetti Computing (NASDAQ: RGTI). The quantum chipmaker has won several fans and seen its share price soar over the past year. But Rigetti’s stock is now trading more than 60% off its 2025 high, and it’s even given back all of the gains it’s made so far in 2026.
So is now a good time to buy this up-and-coming quantum computing stock?
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The quantum computing industry is still in its infancy. But that hasn’t stopped companies from jumping into it. Start-ups like Rigetti are competing with tech giants like Alphabet‘s Google and IBM to develop the tech that could become a commercially viable product.
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Essentially, all these companies are trying to optimize their quantum computers on three separate metrics: speed, accuracy, and scale. Speed refers to the amount of time it takes a quantum system to manipulate a quantum particle at a “quantum gate,” and then to move it to the next gate and prepare it for its next computation.
Accuracy is commonly measured by “two-qubit gate fidelity,” and refers to the percentage of computations that are error-free within the system. Scale is the number of physical qubits in a quantum system. The difficulty for all quantum companies is that as scale and speed increase, accuracy tends to decrease.
It seems likely that the companies able to maximize their systems’ performance through a combination of speed, accuracy, and scale are most likely to be among quantum computing’s big winners. How does Rigetti compare to its rivals in this regard?
The speed of Rigetti’s systems is quite impressive. It claims that its 108-qubit system — roughly the largest-scale system available today — has achieved gate speeds of 50-70 nanoseconds. That’s incredibly fast.
But the median accuracy of that 108-qubit system is only 99% as measured by two-qubit gate fidelity. That may sound like a great rate, but in the world of quantum computing, differences of even 0.01% are significant.
The company’s smaller systems are more accurate, though. Its 36-qubit system has achieved two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.6%, and its 9-qubit system has reached 99.7%. The problem here is that rival IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) boasts that it has achieved 99.99% fidelity in a 100-qubit system. To be fair, though, IonQ’s systems, although much more accurate than Rigetti’s, are much slower.
Rigetti CEO Dr. Subodh Kulkarni said last month in a press release that the company has “a clear understanding of what we need to do to achieve 99.5% median two-qubit gate fidelity” in its Cepheus-1-108Q system, which is set to be released this quarter. But even if it can achieve that benchmark, there’s still a long way to go.
Image source: Getty Images.
For a quantum computer to be commercially viable, it’s estimated to need at least 1 million physical qubits and 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity (and probably closer to 99.99999%). So we’re still a long way from quantum computing becoming mainstream.
Rigetti believes it’s on track to develop a system with 1,000 qubits by 2027 with 99.7% two-qubit gate fidelity, but hasn’t given longer-term estimates. Rival IonQ is targeting a 10,000-qubit system by 2027 and a 2 million-qubit system by 2030. If Rigetti scaled up on a similar trajectory, it would achieve a 200,000-qubit system by 2030 and surpass the 1 million-qubit threshold by 2031.
But there’s no way to know how accurate such a massive system would be, nor whether Rigetti can beat IonQ to the punch as well as deep-pocketed rivals like Google and IBM.
So, is Rigetti a buy now? Nobody but the most risk-tolerant investors should even consider it: The company is too speculative, and a lot can change between now and 2030.
Image source: Getty Images.
On the bright side, according to data from McKinsey & Company, the quantum computing market could be as large as $72 billion by 2030. If Rigetti can control a large enough piece of that pie, it could be a huge winner from here. But a lot would have to go Rigetti’s way for that to happen, and right now there’s no way to know how things will shake out in this rapidly developing field.
For investors who want to buy into the quantum computing trend early, Rigetti isn’t a bad choice, but it’s probably not a good idea to put all your eggs in one (quantum) basket. I would rather take a small stake in Rigetti alongside other quantum computing companies, or invest in a quantum computing ETF so I could give myself the best odds of picking a winner. And I definitely wouldn’t invest money I couldn’t afford to lose.
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John Bromels has positions in Alphabet. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, International Business Machines, and IonQ. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Enabled by the introduction of its Willow quantum chip last year, Google today claims it’s conducted breakthrough research that confirms it can create real-world applications for quantum computers. The company’s Quantum Echoes algorithm, detailed in a paper published in Nature, is a demonstration of “the first-ever verifiable quantum advantage running the out-of-order time correlator (OTOC) algorithm.”
A core belief in quantum computing is that developing computer systems with qubits — which can represent multiple states at once, as opposed to binary ones and zeroes — could lead to greater understanding of the quantum systems surrounding us. Google believes its new algorithm is further proof of that assumption. The Quantum Echoes algorithm is able to illustrate how different parts of a quantum system interact with each other, in a way that’s repeatable by other quantum computers and that “runs 13,000 times faster on Willow than the best classical algorithm on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers.”
The “echo” in Quantum Echoes comes from how Google’s algorithm interacts with a quantum system, in this case the Willow chip. “We send a carefully crafted signal into our quantum system (qubits on Willow chip), perturb one qubit, then precisely reverse the signal’s evolution to listen for the ‘echo’ that comes back,” the company explained in its announcement blog. That echo is magnified by the “constructive interference” of quantum waves, making the measurement Google is able to take extremely sensitive.
That sensitivity suggests quantum computers could be an important tool in modeling things like the interaction of particles or the structure of molecules. In a separate experiment with the University of California, Berkeley, Google tried to prove that by running the Quantum Echoes algorithm to study two different molecules, and comparing it to the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) method currently used by scientists to understand chemical structure. The results from both systems matched, and Google says Quantum Echoes even “revealed information not usually available from NMR.”
In the longterm, a full-scale quantum computer could be used for everything from drug discovery to the development of new battery components. For now though, Google believes its Quantum Echoes research means real-world quantum computer applications could arrive within the next five years.
