QBTS Soars Over 1,300% Despite IBM and GOOGL's Quantum Milestones

D-Wave Quantum Inc. QBTS has emerged as one of the most compelling stories in the high-tech investment landscape, driven by a massive surge of 1,343.6% over the past year, far outpacing the industry and benchmarks. This growth underscores growing investor confidence in the company's quantum annealing technology.

While giants like International Business Machines IBM and Alphabet GOOGL dominate headlines with their gate-based quantum systems, D-Wave has introduced a commercially focused path through quantum annealing, solving complex optimization problems in minutes. This alternative approach of D-Wave is rapidly expanding into commercial use cases in logistics, finance and manufacturing, where it delivers tangible business outcomes today.

QBTS Price Performance

Why D-Wave's Commercial Utility is a Long-Term Play

D-Wave stands out as a long-term investment by solving real-world problems today, unlike its rivals, which are focused on future gate-model systems. Its annealing-based Advantage2 prototype has already demonstrated quantum advantage, completing tasks in minutes that would take classical supercomputers millennia. With its Leap cloud platform and active deployments at companies like Ford Otosan and NTT DOCOMO, D-Wave is generating real commercial value. As demand for optimization and AI accelerates, its proven technology and enterprise traction give it strong staying power in the quantum space.

IBM and Google Target Quantum Future

IBM: On June 10, 2025, IBM revealed its plan for Quantum Starling, its first fault-tolerant quantum computer, set to be launched by 2029. Designed to run 20,000× more operations than current systems, Starling will use around 200 logical qubits with advanced error correction and real-time oversight. This marks a major step from theory to practical, large-scale quantum computing.

Alphabet: In December 2024, Google unveiled Willow, a 105-qubit processor that marked a major step forward in quantum error correction. Tests showed that adding more qubits significantly reduced error rates, achieving a key milestone known as “below-threshold” scaling. Willow also completed a complex task in under five minutes that would take classical supercomputers trillions of years. Google expects real-world quantum applications within five years in areas like drug discovery, battery design and energy.

Estimates for D-Wave

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for D-Wave’s 2025 earnings implies a 72% improvement year over year.

D-Wave Quantum currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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