New York, Feb 17, 2026, 05:45 EST — Premarket
- Rigetti Computing shares were down about 2% in premarket trading after Monday’s U.S. market holiday.
- Traders are looking toward early March earnings and the company’s late-quarter timeline for its 108-qubit system.
Rigetti Computing shares slipped 2% in premarket trade on Tuesday, last at about $15.76, after ending the prior session at $16.09, with the stock often moving sharply on thin news flow.
The move matters because Rigetti has become a high-beta proxy for risk appetite in the small-cap quantum computing group, where timelines are long and near-term headlines can swing valuations fast. Traders will be watching whether the stock steadies once the regular session opens.
There was no fresh company announcement early Tuesday. Still, investors have been reluctant to add exposure without clearer signs on delivery dates, customer demand and progress on technical targets.
Rigetti is one of a handful of U.S.-listed “pure play” quantum firms, alongside IonQ and D-Wave Quantum, and the group tends to trade as a basket when sentiment turns.
In January, Rigetti pushed the expected general availability of its 108-qubit Cepheus-1-108Q system to around the end of the first quarter of 2026 and pointed to work aimed at improving “two-qubit gate fidelity” — a core accuracy measure for basic quantum operations. CEO Subodh Kulkarni said the company was “taking more time to test and optimize,” citing “complexities with our tunable couplers,” while the company disclosed median two-qubit gate fidelity of 99% on its 108-qubit system at the time.
Also in January, Rigetti disclosed an $8.4 million purchase order to deliver a 108-qubit, on-premises quantum computer to India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), with deployment scheduled for the second half of 2026. Kulkarni called it a sign of “growing demand for on-premises quantum computers.”
For now, the stock is trading in the gap between those milestones and hard numbers. That leaves investors leaning on broader tech sentiment and any sign of follow-on orders, especially from governments and research labs that can move slowly but write larger checks.
The downside scenario is familiar for early-stage hardware names: another delay, a customer pushing out an installation date, or performance falling short of targets that matter for commercial use. Any of those can land as a surprise in a quarter where revenue is already lumpy.
Next up is results. Rigetti is expected to release its next earnings report on March 5, with investors focused on cash use, backlog and any update to the Cepheus timeline.
