Google now has 5 Nobel Prize winners, says Sundar Pichai while congratulating Physics laureates

Pichai

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai congratulated the winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics, celebrating a special connection to Google as one of the laureates currently works at the company, while another is a former employee.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Pichai praised Michel Devoret, John Martinis, and John Clarke for their groundbreaking work in quantum mechanics, which earned them the prestigious award this year. “Congrats to Michel Devoret, John Martinis, and John Clarke on the Nobel Prize in Physics. Michel is chief scientist of hardware at our Quantum AI lab, and John Martinis led the hardware team for many years,” Pichai wrote.

The Google CEO highlighted how their pioneering research from the 1980s helped shape modern quantum computing. “Their pioneering work in quantum mechanics made recent breakthroughs possible and paved the way for error-corrected quantum computers to come,” he said. Pichai also shared that he had visited Google’s quantum lab in Santa Barbara a day earlier and expressed pride in the company’s achievements. “Feeling lucky this morning to work at a company that has had five Nobel Laureates among our ranks — three prizes in two years!” he added.

According to a Hindustan Times report, John Martinis left Google in 2020 and co-founded Qolab, a quantum computing startup, in 2022.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics honors experiments that demonstrated quantum tunnelling on a macroscopic scale — essentially showing that the strange phenomena of quantum physics can occur in systems large enough to see and handle.

The three laureates constructed an experiment using a superconducting electrical circuit mounted on a one-centimetre chip. Unlike earlier studies that focused on a few particles, their work revealed tunnelling and energy quantisation in a system with billions of Cooper pairs — electrons bound together within a superconductor.

By taking quantum mechanical effects from a microscopic to a macroscopic level, their research not only deepened understanding of the quantum world but also laid the foundation for future error-corrected quantum computers — a field where Google continues to be a major player.