Keithen Drury, The Motley Fool

Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 2:37 AM4 min read

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Rigetti Computing (NASDAQ: RGTI) is one of the more popular quantum computing start-up stocks on the market. It currently trades for around $11 per share, so if it reached $20, the stock would nearly double.

While that may sound like a tall task, Rigetti Computing actually hit $20 during the first few days of the year before selling off. So, can the stock return to its all-time high before the end of 2025?

Rigetti Computing is a quantum computing start-up focused on offering a full-stack quantum computing setup, which includes its quantum processing units (QPUs) and the software necessary to use them. This is a key investment point for Rigetti, as it could become a complete quantum computing solution should it win the quantum computing arms race.

The biggest challenge facing quantum computing right now is computing accuracy, which is an inherent problem in all quantum computing devices, regardless of who manufactures them.

Traditional computers process information in bits, which are either a 0 or a 1. This makes the answer black or white, as there's no room for interpretation. However, quantum computing uses qubits, which can better be described as a range of answers from 0 to 1. While a qubit will collapse an answer down to a 0 or a 1 when it's measured, the ability for an answer to exist in a superposition between a 0 and a 1 makes quantum computing more potent than traditional computing. The nuance of the data bits makes them much more powerful for certain types of computing work.

However, because we cannot measure the qubit's superposition, the calculation is open to errors. There are multiple ways to make the calculation more accurate, and each company takes its own approach. This will be the deciding factor for which quantum computing companies are successful and which aren't.

Rigetti Computing has taken the superconducting approach, which involves cooling the particles to a hundredth of a Kelvin, essentially absolute zero. This slows the particle's movement down to allow it to be measured, and this technology isn't a thing of the future; it's available today.

Rigetti's Novera QPU is available to purchase, and is a 9-qubit QPU that a company can purchase starting at $900,000. It's Rigetti's most advanced offering to date, and delivers a 99.4% 2-qubit gate fidelity.