New York, January 11, 2026, 12:09 EST — The market has closed.
- Rigetti shares dropped 2.1% Friday, closing at $24.72.
- The company delayed the “general availability” of its 108-qubit system to roughly late Q1 2026.
- CEO Subodh Kulkarni highlighted testing efforts and hardware “complexities” as key challenges while aiming for improved accuracy.
Rigetti Computing (RGTI) shares dropped 2.1% Friday following an update on the timeline for its upcoming 108-qubit system. The quantum-computing company’s news served as a fresh example of how quickly smaller, milestone-focused tech stocks can react to shifts in their roadmaps. The stock closed at $24.72. 1
This update matters because investors have pegged hardware progress as the key metric in the sector. Any delay in the next system, even by a few weeks, can throw off expectations about when customers will actually start using the machine for real work.
It kicks off the new week with U.S. markets closed over the weekend, leaving traders to sift through what shifted and what stayed the same. For a company still chasing scale, the debate often hinges on the gap between a lab milestone and a product ready to ship.
Rigetti’s CEO, Dr. Subodh Kulkarni, said the company is “taking more time to test and optimize” Cepheus-1-108Q. He noted they encountered “complexities with our tunable couplers,” which led to another chip iteration. 2
The company is pushing for better “two-qubit gate fidelity,” which gauges how reliably a basic operation between two qubits (the core units of quantum information) performs. Rigetti aims for a 99.5% median fidelity and has already hit 99% on its 108-qubit machine, with even higher rates on smaller setups.
Cepheus-1-108Q aims to be the company’s largest qubit system yet, assembled from multiple smaller “chiplets” in a modular setup. Rigetti now expects general availability around the end of Q1 2026. 3
The market will likely focus on the timing of “general availability”—when a system is fully ready for widespread customer use, beyond limited access. Customers, particularly those developing early applications or seeking research funding, also base their plans on this milestone.
Yet the updated roadmap underscores the risk investors fret over: boosting qubit counts may trigger fresh engineering challenges, and solving them often means going back and forth rather than moving straight ahead. If this additional chip cycle pushes testing past the company’s deadline, the following update might focus on delays once more.
Trading restarts Monday, and investors will be keen on any updates about testing results, plus whether Rigetti can meet its late-Q1 delivery target. The next big milestone is the quarterly report, with Nasdaq data indicating an earnings release due in early March. 4
