NEW YORK, May 27, 2026, 04:46 EDT
- Rigetti shares ended Tuesday at $25.07, down 5.13%. The drop followed a two-day rally after news of U.S. quantum funding.
- New Rigetti developments on Wednesday signaled moves in manufacturing and updates with partners.
- The next thing for the stock is to see if policy support leads to real contracted funding and revenue, not only a higher multiple.
Rigetti Computing was down early Wednesday as the quantum-computing stock lost ground after recent spikes. Shares ended Tuesday at $25.07, off 5.13%, following big gains of 30.57% on May 21 and 19.87% on May 22. Premarket quotes had Rigetti slipping further to $24.50 at about 4:43 a.m. EDT.
This is the situation now. Investors have new company news to trade, while they also gauge if last week’s government-led rally got out in front of what’s still a small commercial base for quantum hardware.
Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology said Rigetti has purchased a PlasmaPro 100 Cobra atomic layer etch tool to help make quantum devices. Atomic layer etching is a process that strips away material layer by layer at the chip level, important when small defects cause problems. Rigetti CEO Subodh Kulkarni said their in-house foundry approach lets them shift “from prototypes to production, in weeks, rather than months.” AZoQuantum
Quantum Machines gave its second Wednesday update saying it ran Rigetti’s Novera superconducting quantum chip at 99.5% median two-qubit gate fidelity. Fidelity checks how often quantum operations work right; higher is better, with fewer errors. Yonatan Cohen, the company’s CTO, said it means superconducting processors in the field can now hit “a very high level” when managed by Quantum Machines’ control system. The Quantum Insider
Hardware news comes days after the U.S. Department of Commerce said it sent out nine letters of intent for $2.013 billion in incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act. That includes as much as $100 million for Rigetti for work on superconducting quantum tech. The CHIPS and Science Act is the U.S. law for funding domestic semiconductor and advanced-technology projects.
Rigetti said the planned award would cover three years, with the government getting an equity stake matching the funding size. Kulkarni said the money would help the company “tackle key scaling bottlenecks more rapidly.” Scaling — making systems bigger without letting errors pile up — is still a main roadblock for quantum computing. Rigetti & Co, LLC
Rally isn’t just hitting Rigetti. The Commerce Department’s package sent $1 billion to IBM, $375 million to GlobalFoundries, and about $100 million each for D-Wave and Infleqtion, Reuters said. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Reuters the new IBM quantum-chip company will give customers “the exact same capability that we have for ourselves.” Reuters
Quantinuum, backed by Honeywell, is adding to the capital-markets push. The quantum tech firm on Tuesday said it is seeking a valuation as high as $12.7 billion in its planned U.S. IPO. Quantinuum will list on Nasdaq with the symbol QNT. The move gives the market another way to price quantum companies. Most are still unprofitable, but they promise big tech advances down the road.
Quantum funds aren’t niche anymore, ETF flows show. The Defiance Quantum ETF went over $5 billion in assets, Benzinga reported Tuesday, even as Rigetti, IonQ, D-Wave and IBM pulled back after a run in funding. “A watershed moment” is how Defiance ETFs CIO Sylvia Jablonski described the latest federal grant move for the U.S. quantum sector. Benzinga
Rigetti is still working with a small financial base. First-quarter revenue came in at $4.4 million, while operating loss hit $26.0 million. The company had $569.0 million in cash, cash equivalents, and available-for-sale investments as of March 31. Rigetti also said its 108-qubit Cepheus-1-108Q machine is now available via Rigetti QCS, Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure Quantum and qBraid.
Rigetti’s slide was hard to miss Tuesday, with the wider market higher. The Nasdaq Composite was up 1.2% to 26,656.18 and the S&P 500 gained 0.6%, after trading started again following the Memorial Day break.
The risks aren’t hard to spot. The Commerce deal is just a letter of intent for now, not final funding. Rigetti flagged risks around getting to a real agreement, how long it might take, whether government money will come through, and possible dilution if securities go to the government. Quantum computers also still have high error rates hurting real-world use, as Reuters called out as a big sector problem.
Rigetti is in the policy-plus-execution camp at this point. There is a policy boost. The question is whether better tools, proof from partners and help from Washington will turn into fresh orders and revenue fast enough to support a stock with a market cap already in the billions.
