Shares of IonQ rose after the company said it had developed and successfully tested an end-to-end, real-time quantum error correction decoder.
Shares are up nearly 11% in after-hours trading. The stock closed Tuesday up 0.6% at $40.74, down 9.2% this year.
IonQ said its real-time error correction decoder is a first across the burgeoning quantum computing industry. Though many companies have developed functional quantum computers, the physical "qubits" at their core are prone to errors from environmental noise, making error correction a key obstacle for the field.
The company said its decoder runs on a single standard CPU, which enables the solution to scale to commercial levels.
It published technical research on the decoder on arXiv, an open-access repository of scientific and technical research.
"IonQ is enabling cost-effective quantum system scaling through direct verification of each component," John Gamble, vice president of IonQ Architecture, said. "Empirical evidence like this supports our vision for fault tolerance where time-to-solution, cost-to-solution, and energy-to-solution are always our North Star."