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

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.

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.