Sundar Pichai Hails Google Quantum Scientists After Nobel Physics Win

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Google CEO Sundar Pichai has congratulated three physicists with deep ties to the company’s Quantum AI program—John Martinis, Michel Devoret, and John Clarke—after they were awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work in quantum mechanics.

In a post on X, Pichai celebrated the trio’s achievement, noting that Michel Devoret, now Chief Scientist of Hardware at Google’s Quantum AI lab, and John Martinis, who previously led the lab’s hardware team, had laid the foundation for some of Google’s most ambitious breakthroughs in quantum computing.

“Michel is Chief Scientist of Hardware at our Quantum AI lab, and John Martinis led the hardware team for many years,” Pichai wrote. “Their foundational work in the 1980s helped pave the way for recent breakthroughs. I was just at our quantum lab in Santa Barbara yesterday, seeing the incredible progress. Hope they’re celebrating today.”

He added that he felt “lucky to work at a company that has had five Nobel Laureates among our ranks — three prizes in two years.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics to Martinis, Devoret, and Clarke “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.” Their early experiments in the mid-1980s used superconducting circuits separated by thin insulating layers — known as Josephson junctions — to demonstrate quantum effects at a macroscopic scale, a finding that has since become central to the design of modern quantum computers.