Sundar Pichai thinks commercially viable quantum computing is just 'a few years' away

Commercially-viable, scalable quantum computing could be just a few years away according to Sundar Pichai, CEO at Alphabet,

Speaking with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff during a fireside chat at Dreamforce 2025, Pichai stated he was “bullish” about the potential of quantum computing in the next ten years, suggesting it could be realized even sooner.

In a long conversation on the future of both quantum and AI, Pichai highlighted the achievements of Google DeepMind as well as the Nobel Prize awarded to its CEO Demis Hassabis and director John M. Jumper.

“We believe in that kind of deep, fundamental R&D with a view of translating real problems,” Pichai said.

“That same quantum computing team, no different from our TPU team, plans to have commercially-available, real, at scale quantum computers in a few years. And I think they will get there.”

In 2024, Google announced its proprietary quantum chip Willow had demonstrated usable error reduction for quantum computing, a major step for achieving scalable quantum computing.

Just this week, Google announced that Willow had run a test algorithm 13,000 times faster than the best corresponding classical algorithm, run on a top supercomputer.

Benioff pointed out that quantum computing could undermine all cryptography, hinting at a need for post-quantum cryptography in the wake of any significant quantum advancements.

“I think in three five years’ time, we will have that moment where from a cryptographic standpoint we have to adapt to quantum, for sure,” Pichai stated, adding that people will need to work together on establishing safeguards.

Google isn’t the only company chasing a quantum leap with its own chip design. In February, Microsoft hailed its Majorana 1 quantum processing unit (QPU) as the first such chip of its kind to support a million qubits at once.

But it’s not all consensus. At the start of the year, Jensen Huang, CEO at Nvidia, poured cold water on quantum optimism with a prediction that “truly useful” quantum computing could be 20 years away, prompting stock plunges at companies such as D-Wave and Rigetti Computing.

Huang later walked back his comments and Nvidia has since committed to further quantum research – though continues with its no-chip quantum chip strategy.

ChatGPT reflections

Elsewhere in the conversation, Pichai reflected on the days immediately after the launch of ChatGPT and how Google responded to claims that it had a major competitor in AI and search for the first time in years.

He pointed out that Google began using transformers in 2017, following the publication of its paper Attention Is All You Need, and had made strides with internal chatbots such as BERT then Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) – the latter of which drew headlines after an engineer went public with claims that it was sentient.

When ChatGPT launched, Pichai said, Google had been sitting on its chatbot model over quality concerns but could easily have beaten OpenAI to it.

“I would argue pretty much all of us working on it, we knew in a different world we would have launched our chatbot maybe a few months down the line,” he said.

“We hadn’t quite gotten it to a level where you could put it out and people would be ok with Google putting out that product.”

He also dismissed claims that he had been alarmed or panicked by the launch, with contemporary reports suggesting that Google initiated a state of ‘code red’ and scrambled developers internally to compete with OpenAI.

“For me when ChatGPT launched, contrary to what people outside felt, I was excited because I knew the window had shifted,” he said.

“We had been building this technology for so long, we were so AI-native, everything in the company, every decision we had made. I had decided to take a full-stack approach in AI, we were investing all the way from infrastructure, we built our own chips, to world-class research teams in Google Research, Google Brain, Google DeepMind.”

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