Four Quantum Computing Stocks for 2021
(FinanceYahoo) Growth in worldwide spending on quantum computing–with government and academic institutions leading the drive–is estimated to be a key catalyst in 2021 and beyond.
Investors looking to tap the quantum computing boom in 2021 can bet on Baidu BIDU, Microsoft MSFT, Tencent Holdings Limited TCEHY and Alphabet GOOGL, according to Zacks Investment analyst Radhika Pujara in this article. She explains these companies are focusing on commercialization and democratization of technology to aid enterprises in accelerating computational processes and enhancing their business productivity.
1) Baidu: Beijing, China-based internet browser operator Baidu’s expertise in artificial intelligence and its growing focus on quantum computing makes it an inevitable pick. The company has a dedicated institute for quantum computing named Baidu Quantum Computing Institute with the distinguished quantum computing expert Professor Runyao Duan at its helm. Duan intends to transform the institute into a top-notch establishment and integrate quantum computing tech across the company’s various business operations, especially AI. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings for 2021 has improved 4.7% to $10.00 over the past 60 days, which highlights bullish sentiments for the stock.
2) Microsoft Microsoft’s Quantum Network is growing with various kits and libraries meant for quantum machine-learning applications. The tech giant’s cloud computing platform Azure unveiled a full-stack, open cloud ecosystem Azure Quantum, which is a diverse set of quantum services. In partnership with 1QBit, Honeywell, IonQ and QCI, the company strives to offer robust quantum solutions, software and hardware.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings for fiscal 2021 has improved 5.8% to $6.73 over the past 60 days. Currently, Microsoft carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).
3) Tencent: Another China-based Internet company Tencent is taking slow but steady strides in the quantum computing space.
In2019, the company announced that it will make an investment of 500 billion yuan (roughly $70 billion) over the upcoming five years in “new infrastructure” technology including cloud computing, AI, cybersecurity, blockchain, servers, quantum computing, big data centers, supercomputer centres, IoT operating systems and 5G networks.
The company’s dedicated Tencent Quantum Lab, with renowned scientist, Shengyu Zhang, as its Laboratory Director, seeks to explore the connect of fundamental quantum theory with real-life practical applications. Further, the company’s Quantum Computing Cloud is currently under construction.
Notably, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings for 2021 has improved 4.8% to $2.39 over the past 60 days. Currently, Tencent carries a Zacks Rank of 2.
4) Alphabet’s Google: Alphabet’s Google is striving to gain a competitive edge over International Business Machines IBM. In fact, Google claimed Quantum Supremacy in 2019, on the back of Sycamore quantum computer, per its white paper. with open-source Python software toolkit (named Cirq), Google is aiding developers to experiment with quantum computing algorithms.
Moreover, open-source platform on GitHub, named OpenFermion, is aimed at developing robust quantum circuits by enhancing electronic structure package of quantum computers.
Further, Google’s TensorFlow Quantum, an ML framework that can construct quantum data sets, prototype hybrid quantum and classic machine learning models, offers support to quantum circuit simulators, and train discriminative and generative quantum models. ongoing research and new use cases of Google’s Bristlecone, a universal quantum computer with a qubit count of 72, remains a key catalyst.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings for 2021 has improved 8.1% to $62.30 over the past 60 days. Alphabet carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), at present.
