Japan's SoftBank Group booked a surprise $2.4 billion quarterly loss on Wednesday, hit by a decline in the value of e-commerce platform Coupang and other tech companies held by its Vision Fund investment arm.

SoftBank Group Corp. tumbled to a loss in the December quarter, weighed down by a drop in the value of the Vision Fund’s public holdings, just as Masayoshi Son campaigns to raise $500 billion for the Stargate artificial-intelligence project.

QuEra Computing, a Boston-based quantum computing company, has raised $230 million in a round led by Google (GOOGL) and SoftBank (SFTBF) ’s Vision Fund 2 to develop “fault-tolerant” quantum computers, designed to overcome the computational errors that have long hindered real-world quantum applications.

Google and SoftBank’s Vision Fund are new investors in Inc., participating in a $230 million funding round for the Boston-based startup, which aims to make quantum computing more practical. QuEra Interim Chief Executive Officer Andy Ory said the latest funding round came together quickly — “in a matter of weeks” — after the startup cleared a series of technical challenges that spurred investors to approach him.

Quantum computing, long relegated to the realm of the theoretical, feels like it is back on the agenda as a potentially viable alternative to the