Microsoft’s Quantum Gaslighting Sparks a Sector Explosion… But Don’t Buy the Hype Just Yet

If you’re the CEO of a quantum computing company, you might want to take a seat… and maybe double-check your prescription for anxiety meds. One day, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is basically reading your industry's obituary, calling it “30 years away from relevance,” and the next, Microsoft is in full cheerleader mode, declaring 2025 as the year businesses need to be “quantum-ready.”

And as I would expect nothing less, this announcement has triggered a stampede of Reddit traders promising to sell their entire Palantir holdings to YOLO into “these 10 quantum stocks.” Bless their diamond hands.

Microsoft’s recent blog post did way more than suggest businesses prepare for quantum… it lit a fire under quantum stocks. Shares of Rigetti Computing jumped over 16%, D-Wave Quantum surged a whopping 26%, and IonQ added nearly 10%. Even the Defiance Quantum and AI ETF got a 3% shot in the arm. Not bad for a sector that was pronounced dead a few weeks ago.

The chaos stems from Microsoft’s Quantum Ready program, a corporate initiative designed to get businesses prepped for the so-called “reliable quantum computing era.” Mitra Azizirad, Microsoft’s president of Strategic Missions and Technologies, confidently declared we’re “on the cusp” of quantum computers solving real-world problems and unlocking “new business value” (in other words: the AI hype is getting old, so let’s pump the quantum balloon).

Before you go balls to the wall in quantum stocks, Jensen Huang hasn’t changed his mind… he still believes useful quantum computing is at least 15 years away, maybe longer. And he’s not alone in the skeptic camp. Yale’s Steven Girvin suggests it’ll be another decade or two before quantum makes any real money. Even Mark Zuckerberg chimed in with his two cents, hinting that quantum’s practicality is more like a Star Wars movie than reality (which is rich coming from a guy who bet on the Metaverse and us all to wear VR glasses instead of going outside). It’s this kind of skepticism that sent quantum stocks tumbling in recent weeks… until Microsoft’s optimism brought the FOMO crowd back into the game.

I’ll admit, quantum computing has the potential to change everything… pharmaceuticals, logistics, cryptography, climate modeling. You name it, and quantum might just blow it out of the water. But right now? Betting on quantum stocks is like betting on SpaceX to build beachfront condos on Mars by 2025 (technically possible but so far-fetched it’s practically laughable).

Quantum computing is still very much like the Tennessee Titans, where the hype far outweighs the actual capabilities. The technology’s biggest breakthroughs so far have been mostly academic, with little to no real-world applications. Sure, quantum computers can solve some specialized problems exponentially faster than classical ones, but only under very specific conditions… and those problems are not what businesses are clamoring to solve right now. So aside from daytrading these quantum stocks, I would be careful putting any real money into them until we find out which ones are actually going to solve real world problems.

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Stock.News has positions in Microsoft and Meta.