Sundar Pichai says 5 Googlers have won Nobel Physics Prizes, congratulates 2025 winners for ‘incredible progress’

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai congratulated the winners of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics, especially noting that one of the three laureates is a scientist at Google, and another is a former employee.

In a post on social media platform X, Sundar Pichai also expressed pride in the fact that Google now has five Nobel Laureates, including three who were awarded in the past two years.

‘Paved the way,’ says Sundar Pichai

“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,” he wrote.

Pichai praised the winners for the Nobel-winning work, adding, “Their pioneering work in quantum mechanics in the 1980s made recent breakthroughs possible, and paved the way for error-corrected quantum computers to come.”

“I was just at our quantum lab in Santa Barbara yesterday, seeing the incredible progress, hope they are celebrating today. Feeling lucky this morning to work at a company that has had 5 Nobel Laureates among our ranks — 3 prizes in 2 years!” he shared.

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

Nobel Prize 2025 in Physics: What were they awarded for?

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics recognises experiments that demonstrated how quantum tunnelling can be observed on a macroscopic scale, involving many particles.

The 2025 Nobel Prize laureates in physics, John Clarke, Michel H Devoret and John M Martinis, used a series of experiments to demonstrate that the bizarre properties of the quantum world can be made concrete in a system big enough to be held in the hand.

The three constructed an experiment using a superconducting electrical circuit. The chip that held this circuit was about a centimetre in size.

Previously, tunnelling and energy quantisation had been studied in systems that had just a few particles. Here, these phenomena appeared in a quantum mechanical system with billions of Cooper pairs that filled the entire superconductor on the chip.

In this way, the experiment took quantum mechanical effects from a microscopic scale to a macroscopic one.