D-Wave Quantum (QBTS, Financial) dips over 7% despite rolling out its Advantage2 system and warning the U.S. trails rivals in quantum annealing.
QBTS surged over 50% in the past five trading sessions—and is up 124% year to date—after CEO Alan Baratz pointed out that D-Wave's quantum annealing approach, unlike gate-based systems from IBM (IBM), Alphabet (GOOG, Financial), IonQ (IONQ, Financial) and Rigetti (RGTI, Financial), is already powering real-world use cases.
D-Wave's latest Advantage2 machine is live in 40+ countries via its cloud, and more than 130 customers—70 of them commercial, including 25 Forbes Global companies—are experimenting with applications from AI-driven drug discovery at Japan Tobacco to logistics optimization at Los Alamos National Lab.
Baratz argued in a Seeking Alpha interview that “the U.S. government is behind other nations on annealing,” missing out on near-term benefits like hurricane-evacuation routing and port-throughput planning.
Chief Development Officer Trevor Lanting added that each new annealing generation delivers “foundational new use cases” through higher qubit coherence and lower energy consumption versus classical systems.
Investors should care because Advantage2's commercial traction and D-Wave's unique tech moat could translate into faster revenue growth and wider adoption—if the company can convert pilot projects into paid deployments.
With geopolitical rivals accelerating their own quantum programs, markets will be watching D-Wave's next quarterly update for signs of government contracts or major enterprise agreements.
