How Google celebrated quantum scientist Michel Devoret’s Nobel Prize win: Sundar Pichai’s LinkedIn post

Michel Devoret, who works at Google as the Chief Scientist of Quantum Hardware, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. He won the prestigious award alongside John Martinis, former hardware leader at Google Quantum AI, and John Clarke of the University of California, Berkeley. Sundar Pichai, the tech giant’s CEO, has taken to LinkedIn to share about this win and express how the company celebrated the Nobel laureate.

In a LinkedIn post, Sundar Pichai talked about Michel Devoret’s role at Google. (AP)

“Always fun to wake up to the news that someone you work with received a Nobel Prize. Those October mornings are becoming much more frequent for us at Google!” Sundar Pichai wrote. In the following lines, he spoke about Martinis’ achievements.

“I had just visited our quantum lab in Santa Barbara a day earlier and saw the incredible progress being built on the foundational research they did together back in the 1980s. Their work on macroscopic quantum effects is why we have a path to error-corrected quantum computers today.”

The CEO jokingly added, “Congrats, Michel! Hope Demis Hassabis and John Jumper are teaching you the secret handshake.” Hassabis and Jumper are 2024 Nobel Prize winners.

Social media reacts:

The post prompted a series of remarks from social media users. An individual posted, “Amazing. By my count, that’s 5 Nobel Laureates in the Google ranks now! Phenomenal.” Another added, “This is a proud moment for Google and a testament to the power of fundamental research to shape the future. Congratulations, Michel Devoret, and a nod to our other Nobel laureates, Demis Hassabisis and John Jumper, for keeping the inspiration flowing!”

A third expressed, “Striving for excellence.” A fourth wrote, “Congratulations to Michel Devoret, looking forward to seeing the exciting future with quantum computing.”

Who is Michel Devoret?

Born in 1953 in Paris, France, he received the prestigious award “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.” According to a blog post by the Nobel committee, at the time of the award, he was associated with “Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA; University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.”