Listen and subscribe to Opening Bid on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Amazon Music , YouTube , or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

Investors are attempting to validate the roller-coaster quantum computing trade.

Here's one yardstick: "The way to know when a certain new industry is important is when Taiwan Semiconductor is willing to make chips for it," Bank of America semiconductor analyst Vivek Arya said on Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid podcast (see video above or listen below).

"They have said nothing about doing that," Arya continued. "So it doesn't mean that this industry is not important, it doesn't mean that it's not a very high-growth industry, but in the relative context of where the semiconductor industry is, it's still extremely, extremely small."

The quantum computing trade has been one of the more volatile trades in the market over the past six months, with good reason.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) co-founder Jensen Huang downplayed the potential for quantum computing at his Jan. 6 keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

“If you said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that would probably be on the early side,” Huang said. “If you said 30, it’s probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it.”

Watch: Google is a monopoly, warns founder of search competitor

Then, fellow tech billionaire and Meta ( META ) co-founder Mark Zuckerberg tossed cold water on quantum computing.

Zuckerberg said on the Joe Rogan podcast on Jan. 10 that he sees quantum's potential as still a "decade-plus out."

“I’m not really an expert on quantum computing — my understanding is that’s still quite a ways off from being a very useful paradigm,” Zuckerberg said.

The downbeat commentary wreaked havoc on the red-hot quantum computing trade, which kicked off in early December 2024 when Google ( GOOG ) unveiled its high-powered quantum chip , dubbed Willow.

D-Wave Quantum ( QBTS ) and Rigetti Computing ( RGTI ) — the two main quantum trades being played by retail investors — are up 2% and down 38%, respectively, year to date.

"There is the possibility that [Jensen Huang] could be wrong," Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told me on the Opening Bid podcast in February . "There is the possibility in the next three to five years that one of these techniques would get enough true logical qubits to solve some very tough problems. And Microsoft is a competitor in that space."

Huang tried to walk back his bearish comments at Nvidia's GTC gathering last week in a roundtable with top quantum computing CEOs.