The first quantum computer company to pull off a stock market listing made its debut on Wall Street on Friday, marking a milestone for a technology that until recently was thought to be many years from practical use.
IonQ’s public listing, through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or Spac, comes as much larger amounts of capital have started to pour into quantum companies on rising hopes that rudimentary forms of the technology will soon be solving day-to-day problems for businesses.
Quantum computers harness the weird effects of quantum mechanics to process information in ways that massively accelerate certain types of calculation. But the difficulty of controlling the qubits at the heart of the systems has made it hard to build systems large enough to harness the effects in practical ways.