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When Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang speaks, the market scrutinizes every word – making every appearance a major opportunity for a boom or bust for the company, its partners, and the industry at large.
Despite a series of splashy and impressive announcements from companies, a few lines from Huang stifled the exciting new hope of technology.
Stocks attached to quantum computing collapsed Wedntoday after Huang comments that useful quantum computers are years away. That is hardly a new observation. But markets moved because of Huang's growing stature on Wall Street and the impatience for innovation he revealed.
When Google (GOOG, GOOGLE) unveiled the Willow quantum chips last monthstocks in the ecosystem generated, even as market analysts acknowledged that commercial applications were a long way off.
Contrast that with Huang's comments, and quantum aspirations became dead weight.
“If you were to say 15 years for really useful quantum computers, that would probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it's probably on the late side,” Huang said during Nvidia's analyst day at CES Wednesday. “If you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it.”
Projecting potential revenue streams in the decades seemed too much to bear for an industry that measures itself quarterly.
Rigetti Computing Shares ( Rigetti Computing Shares )RGTI), D-Wave Quantum (QBTS), and IonQ (IONQ) all plunged more than 40% following Huang's comments. The quantum names are coming off huge periods, boosted by Google's announcement in December, as investors scramble to get into technology that could change society as close to the ground floor as possible.
But Huang seemed to be offering a reality check, or a reason to offload a stock that reached dizzying heights. Over the past year, Rigetti has gained over 900%, D-Wave Quantum close to 600%, and IonQ almost 150%.
However far these companies' applications may be in the future, Google offered something concrete to the marketand it helped the search giant pull off the December rally, picking up related players. Meanwhile, the prognostication of a technology operator – though perhaps one of the brightest stars in corporate America – sent shares careening into a ditch.
The irony of Wall Street pulling back from a supposed paradigm-shifting technology is that the market is already deep in the AI transformation. Proponents of quantum computing see advances in the field as a path to surpass conventional data processing, leading to breakthroughs in medicine, energy and cyber security. But if investors are already growing impatient with the promises of AI, the fruits of even more distant technology may seem too far away to be tasted.