A person shows Google Quantum AI’s “Willow” chip, in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on December 6, 2024.
Google | Via Reuters
Alphabet shares rose 5% during trading Tuesday, the day after the company hailed its latest quantum computing chip as a “breakthrough.”
The Google parent company on Monday revealed “Willow,” a quantum computing chip that the company said performed significantly better on a quantum computing benchmark than its predecessor did in 2019. Willow, like similar quantum chips, uses uncertain “qubits” to represent numbers instead of transistors, which are used on traditional semiconductors. Google said its technology can reduce expected errors faster than they appear as quantum chips get bigger, which has been a bottleneck in the development of better quantum computers.
Willow is the second milestone in a six-step strategy to develop quantum computers that can perform useful applications, Google said. The chip has about 100 qubits, but Google is planning to eventually build a system with 1 million qubits.
“Willow brings us closer to running practical, commercially-relevant algorithms that can’t be replicated on conventional computers,” Google wrote in a blog post, adding that the experiment is evidence that suggests that reality is comprised of parallel universes.
“We see Willow as an important step in our journey to build a useful quantum computer with practical applications in areas like drug discovery, fusion energy, battery design + more,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on X.
When quantum computing matures, it is expected to be useful for large-scale simulations and code breaking, but that may not be possible for years or decades. Google isn’t the only tech giant working on quantum computing. Nvidia, Microsoft and IBM are also working on the technology, in addition to researchers at startups and universities.
Google’s announcement was praised on social media by several technology business figures, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“We should do a quantum cluster in space with Starship one day,” Pichai replied to Musk.
Judy Faulkner, Epic’s 82-year-old CEO, dressed for the occasion in a purple wig with neon green shoes and an iridescent vest, reminiscent of the fictional character Buzz Lightyear from the “Toy Story” franchise.
At the science fiction-themed event, Faulkner told the crowd that Epic has roughly 200 different AI features in development that aim to assist patients, clinicians and insurers.
“We are combining the intelligence and curiosity of the human being with the investigative capabilities of gen AI,” Faulkner said, in front of thousands of health-care executives packed into an 11,400-seat underground auditorium.
Epic, one of the largest private technology companies in the country, is best known for its electronic health record, or EHR, software. An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that’s updated by doctors and nurses, and the technology is integral to the modern U.S. health-care system.
Epic’s software, which competes with Oracle Health (formerly Cerner), is used by 280 million Americans, according to the company. Many patients know of Epic because of its user portal called MyChart.
Last week, Epic announced MyChart Central, which will allow patients to log in to MyChart with just one set of credentials, rather than needing a username and password for each health system they visit. It’s equally helpful for health-care organizations, Faulkner said.
“You’ll spend less time handling patient calls and resetting passwords,” she said in her keynote on Tuesday. “Demographic changes like address need to be added only once.”
A new addition to the MyChart portal is the always-on Emmie assistant, which the company said will be able to answer questions about lab results, propose appointment times and suggest relevant screenings that patients can discuss with their doctor.
During Epic’s three-hour presentation, Faulkner and other executives introduced Emmie as well as other AI assistants the company calls Art and Penny, highlighting new capabilities that are coming in the next year and beyond.
Health-care executives attend UGM 2025.
Courtesy of Epic
The Art assistant is intended for clinicians, and is meant to act as an active AI digital colleague, the company said. Art will be able to anticipate information that a doctor might need, for instance, and can pull up information like blood pressure trends, update a patient’s family history and place orders.
The company also said Art will be able to draft clinical notes, which was one of the most highly anticipated announcements ahead of the conference. AI-powered clinical documentation tools, which are often called AI scribes, can take notes on patient visits in real time as doctors record their encounters, with a patient’s consent.
AI scribes have exploded in popularity as health-care executives search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads. Some startups in the space, including Abridge and Ambience Healthcare, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors.
Epic said its AI charting tool is being built in collaboration with Microsoft. Epic and Microsoft have been working closely together for roughly two decades, and Microsoft’s DAX Copilot product is already a popular offering within the AI scribing market.
“We’re proud to be collaborating with Epic to explore how we can bring our core Dragon ambient AI technology to Epic’s new AI Charting capability to further improve care delivery,” Joe Petro, corporate vice president of Microsoft Health & Life Sciences said in a statement.
Epic’s Penny assistant is designed to help with revenue cycle management and other administrative needs, such as generating appeal letters for insurance claims that get denied. It can also help speed up medical coding by serving up suggestions, Faulkner said. Those two features are already live.
“With all the challenges health-care organizations are facing, we need to make sure our clinicians and our organizations are strong and doing well in order to be able to take care of patients,” Faulkner said.
Epic closed out its executive address by teasing new AI capabilities that are coming to Cosmos, which is a deidentified patient dataset clinicians can use to conduct research. Health systems have to opt-in to participate in Cosmos, and the database currently includes information from more than 1,760 hospitals and 300 million patients.
Epic said it’s building a set of proprietary foundation models, called Cosmos AI, based on this data. The company is still evaluating different applications of the models, and launched the Cosmos AI Lab to help researchers and data scientists learn more.
Executives said the models could be used to predict a timeline of a patient’s potential medical events, like whether they’re a readmission risk or could eventually experience a heart attack.
“We’re finding that it continues to improve as it sees more patients,” said Seth Hain, a senior vice president of research and development at Epic. “Having only used 8 billion encounters so far, we’re just getting started.”
The logo of Japanese company SoftBank Group is seen outside the company’s headquarters in Tokyo on January 22, 2025.
Kazuhiro Nogi | Afp | Getty Images
Shares of SoftBank Group plunged as much as 9.17% Wednesday, as technology stocks in Asia declined, tracking losses in U.S. peers overnight.
The Japanese tech-focused investment firm saw shares drop for a second consecutive session, following its announcement of a $2 billion investment in Intel. Intel shares rose 6.97% to close at $25.31 Tuesday stateside.
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SoftBank Group shares
Other Japanese tech stocks also declined, with semiconductor giant Advantest falling as much as 6.27%. Meanwhile, shares in Renesas Electronics and Tokyo Electron were last seen trading 2.46% and 0.75% lower, respectively.
Technology companies in South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, also fell after U.S. tech stocks dropped overnight spurred by declines in artificial intelligence darling Nvidia‘s shares.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is considering the federal government taking equity stakes in semiconductor companies that get funding under the CHIPS Act for building plants in the U.S, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The U.S. CHIPS and Science Act seeks to boost the country’s semiconductor industry, scientific research and innovation.
Shares of Taiwanese chip company TSMC and manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry — known globally as Foxconn — declined 1.69% and 2.16%, respectively. TSMC manufactures Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units that help power large language models, while Foxconn has a strategic partnership with Nvidia to build “AI factories.”
Meanwhile, South Korean tech stocks mostly fell with shares of chipmaker SK Hynix down 3.33%. Samsung Electronics, however, rose 0.75%.
TSMC, Samsung and SK Hynix are among companies that have received funding under the CHIPS Act.
Over in Hong Kong, the Hang Seng Tech index lost 0.87% in early trade.
CEO of Palantir Technologies Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on July 15, 2025.
Andrew Caballero-reynolds | Afp | Getty Images
Palantir‘s stock slumped more than 9% on Tuesday, falling for a fifth straight day to continue its pullback from all-time highs.
The artificial intelligence software provider’s stock has slid more than 15% over the last five trading sessions, after a stellar earnings report earlier this month propelled shares to all-time highs. The report was Palantir’s first-ever $1 billion revenue quarter.
Tuesday’s dip coincided with a broader market pullback.
Palantir is the most significant gainer to date in the S&P 500 in 2025, up more than 100%.
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Shares have more than doubled as the company benefits from ongoing AI enthusiasm, scooping up government contracts with President Donald Trump pushing to overhaul agencies.
Palantir’s ascent has pushed the company into a list of top 10 U.S. tech firms and 20 most valuable U.S. companies, while also making shares incredibly expensive to own. Its forward price-to-earnings ratio, which tracks future earnings relative to share price, has soared past 245 times.
By comparison, technology giants such as Microsoft and Apple carry a P/E of nearly 30 times and rake in significantly greater quarterly revenues. Meta‘s and Alphabet‘s P/E ratios hover in the 20s.