IonQ shares rally after company says it made a major quantum computing breakthrough

Shares of IonQ surged Wednesday after the company said it demonstrated the quantum computing industry's first end-to-end real-time quantum error decoder. The milestone, which IonQ announced Tuesday, makes it possible for a single standard computer processor to find, fix and decode computer errors as they happen, as it runs continuously in the background. The successful test stands to alleviate a significant industry bottleneck in which previous systems became easily overwhelmed in fixing errors in the sensitive systems, leading to delays in the system. The stock was last up more than 11% and gained as much as 15% in premarket trading. If the surge holds, it will mark IonQ's best trading day since Aug. 7 — when it jumped 11.8%. "Successfully validating real-time decoding across hundreds of logical qubits and over millions of logical operations is an important milestone. Moreover, the fact that our decoder runs on a single CPU provides a practical path to commercial-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing," quantum research lead Nicolas Delfosse said in a statement Tuesday. IonQ's partners include AI boom titans Amazon Web Services and Nvidia and pharmaceuticals such as AstraZeneca. IonQ recently raised its full-year revenue guidance following the firm's acquisition of semiconductor manufacturer SkyWater Technologies. Other quantum stocks rose across the board on the news. Rigetti Computing, D-Wave and Quantum Computing were all up more than 4% ahead of the open. "Empirical evidence like this supports our vision for fault tolerance where time-to-solution, cost-to-solution, and energy-to-solution are always our North Star," Jon Gable, VP at IonQ Architecture, added in the release.