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

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Shares of IonQ rose Wednesday after the company said it demonstrated the quantum computing industry's first end-to-end real-time quantum error decoder.

The company's stock was more than 5% higher in morning trading after surging over 10% before the bell.

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, leading to delays.

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IonQ past few days

"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," said Nicolas Delfosse, quantum research lead at IonQ, in a statement Tuesday.

IonQ's partners include artificial intelligence boom titans Amazon Web Services and Nvidia and pharmaceutical companies such as AstraZeneca. IonQ recently raised its full-year revenue guidance following the company's acquisition of semiconductor manufacturer SkyWater Technology.

Quantum stocks rose across the board on the news in premarket trading, but most gave back their gains after 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," John Gamble, vice president at IonQ Architecture, added in the release.

Correction: IonQ acquired SkyWater Technology. An earlier version misstated a company name. John Gamble is vice president at IonQ Architecture. An earlier version misspelled his name.