Google has continuously won Nobel Prizes! AI won last year's Chemistry Prize, and quantum computing won this year's Physics Prize

Scientists from Alphabet, Google's parent company, have won the Nobel Prize for two consecutive years, further highlighting the tech giant's strong capabilities in cutting-edge fundamental research areas such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, technologies that are expected to have a disruptive impact on future business and market landscapes.

The latest development is that the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three physicists for their groundbreaking contributions in the field of quantum mechanics, including Michel Devoret, the current hardware chief scientist at Google's Quantum AI lab, and John Martinis, who led its hardware team for many years. This honor not only recognizes their personal achievements but also provides strong endorsement for Google's leading position in the next-generation computing technology race.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai quickly congratulated the winners and emphasized that their research laid the foundation for the company's latest breakthroughs in quantum computing. He stated on social media that their work paves the way for the realization of future error-correcting quantum computers. This statement sends a clear signal to the market: Google's long-term investment in fundamental science is translating into its core competitiveness in critical technology areas for the future.

The awarding of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics follows last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to researchers from Google's DeepMind. The consecutive top scientific awards for Google demonstrate its ability to transform massive capital investment in R&D into world-class scientific achievements, which is crucial for assessing the company's long-term investment value.

Focus on Quantum Breakthroughs

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Michel Devoret, John Martinis, and John Clarke for their discovery of "macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization in circuits." According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the winners demonstrated through a series of experiments that the peculiar properties of the quantum world can be concretely realized in a sufficiently large, hand-holdable system.

Their research is significant. The Academy explained in its announcement that this superconducting circuit system can tunnel from one state to another as if it were passing through a wall, absorbing and releasing energy in specific units predicted by quantum mechanics.

For Google, the background of the awardees is directly related to its core strategy. Michel Devoret currently serves as the hardware chief scientist at Google's Quantum AI lab and teaches at Yale University, playing a key role in the company's efforts to build scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computers. John Martinis was a researcher at Google, leading the team that achieved the milestone of "quantum supremacy" in 2019, and he left Google in 2020.

AI's Nobel Moment

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is another accolade for Google. Just last year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Sir Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google's artificial intelligence company DeepMind, and senior research scientist John Jumper for their contributions to protein structure prediction The AI model AlphaFold2 developed by them has solved a problem that has plagued the scientific community for 50 years, being able to predict the structure of proteins based on amino acid sequences. The application value of this breakthrough is enormous; since its release in 2020, the model has helped predict the structures of nearly 200 million proteins and has been used by over 2 million researchers from 190 countries, having a profound impact on fields such as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and new materials.

Also awarded alongside them is Professor David Baker from the University of Washington, who received the award for "computational protein design."

R&D Strength of Tech Giants

Winning Nobel Prizes in different cutting-edge fields for two consecutive years clearly outlines Google's R&D landscape and strength as a tech giant. This is not only an academic honor but also directly relates to the company's long-term business moat. Whether it is AI that can accelerate drug development or quantum computing that is expected to solve the current computing power bottleneck, both are key variables determining the future market competition landscape.

Sundar Pichai could not hide his pride when congratulating the physics award winners, mentioning, "I feel very lucky this morning to work at a company with five Nobel laureates—three awards in two years!" His remarks highlight Google's corporate culture of attracting and retaining top research talent, which is seen as the engine of its continuous innovation.

For investors, these awards are an important indicator of the company's innovation capability and future potential. They indicate that Google not only has strong capabilities in the currently dominant digital advertising and cloud computing markets but that its ongoing investment in fundamental science is also paving the way for the company to occupy a favorable position in the next technological revolution