By Mackenzie Tatananni
D-Wave Quantum is making a play for a wider patch of the quantum landscape, laying out a plan for systems meant to break the company out of its current niche.
Ahead of the company's investor day Monday, D-Wave released a technical roadmap for its gate-model systems, targeting 100 logical qubits capable of over 1 million operations by 2032.
What matters from that for the average investor: D-Wave has cornered the market for annealing quantum systems, tailored to optimization problems. Its quantum systems work alongside classical computers, bundled together in what's known as hybrid architecture.
Other players including big names like International Business Machines are focused on a different modality that uses quantum gates, or operations that manipulate the state of quantum bits to solve problems. Since this model is widely applicable and mirrors classical programming logic, the scientific community has found it easier to adopt.
For now, the industry consensus is that there's no right or wrong way to tackle quantum. D-Wave's approach is highly differentiated, seeing as no other companies have brought annealing quantum to market. The company also was the first to commercialize quantum in 2011 with a system sale to Lockheed Martin.
But embracing gate-model systems allows the company to expand its customer base beyond those using quantum for supply-chain optimization and similar tasks.
D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz asserted Monday that the company had a "highly differentiated and credible path" to achieving fault tolerance -- the ability of a machine to operate normally even when its individual components fail or experience disruption.
Shares slipped 1.4% in premarket trading Monday. Futures tracking the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite were up 0.2%.
Write to Mackenzie Tatananni at mackenzie.tatananni@barrons.com
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June 01, 2026 07:44 ET (11:44 GMT)
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