Quantum computing stocks rose by double digits on April 14 and 15, as NVIDIA’s launch of Ising, the world’s first open source quantum AI model family, ignited investor belief that commercial quantum computing is accelerating faster than previous prices.
summary
- IonQ closed up 20.95% to $43.25, D-Wave Quantum rose 22.63% to $20.81, and Rigetti Computing rose 13.28% to $19.11, all driven by the NVIDIA Ising announcement.
- D-Wave’s trading volume was 90.2 million shares, nearly 227% above its three-month average, reflecting sector-wide reratings rather than isolated stock-specific moves.
- Krish Sankar, an analyst at TD Cowen, called NVIDIA Ising a “critical catalyst” that could accelerate the commercialization of the quantum industry.
Quantum computing stocks posted their strongest multi-day rise of 2026, with IonQ, D-Wave Quantum, and Rigetti Computing all closing with double-digit gains on April 14 and 15 after NVIDIA announced Ising, an open-source AI model family for quantum processor calibration and error correction.
IonQ closed up 20.95% at $43.25. D-Wave Quantum stock rose 22.63% to close at $20.81 on trading volume of 90.2 million shares, nearly 227% above its three-month average. Rigetti Computing shares rose 13.28% to $19.11.
NVIDIA Ising is directly targeting the two biggest engineering barriers preventing quantum computers from becoming commercially useful: error correction and processor calibration. Both processes currently require enormous manual overhead and limit the range over which quantum devices can operate reliably.
By providing open source, pre-trained AI models that reduce calibration time from days to hours and improve error-correcting decoding by up to 3x the accuracy, NVIDIA has meaningfully shortened the engineering roadmap for companies like IonQ, D-Wave, and Rigetti, who are all racing to demonstrate consistent commercial benefit before they run out of runways.
Icing will be “a critical catalyst that will accelerate the commercialization of the quantum industry,” Krish Sankar, an analyst at TD Coin, said in a note. The models “could ultimately become a significant catalyst for quantum adoption over time,” B. Riley Securities analyst Craig Ellis told MarketWatch.
IonQ had additional tailwinds
IonQ’s gains were amplified by two additional developments on the same day. The company confirmed a contract award from DARPA’s Heterogeneous Architecture for Quantum program, and separately announced a breakthrough in photonic interconnection linking two independent confined quantum systems, a major step toward large-scale quantum networking.
IONQ’s 2025 revenue was $130 million, up 202% year over year. Its 2026 guidance of $225 million to $245 million indicates growth of approximately 81%. The stock still carries a “Strong Buy” rating with an average price target of $65.91, suggesting a significant upside from current levels even after this week’s rally.
The implications for encryption are worth seeing
Advances in quantum error correction are bringing useful quantum computers closer to practical reality, a development that the cryptocurrency sector has long monitored as… Quantitative threat to current blockchain encryption standards. Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography and the RSA protocols that secure most wallets were not designed to withstand the cryptographic-related quantum machine.
The launch of NVIDIA Ising does not change this timeline in the near term. But every technical advance in correcting errors, or the bottleneck that Ising targets, shortens the path from today’s fragile qubits to the systems that security researchers say will put Bitcoin in its rightful place. More like a risk Within 15 years.
