D-Wave Quantum said Tuesday that its sixth-generation quantum system had become available over the cloud, marking another development in the race to develop commercially viable quantum computers.

The Advantage2 system is the successor to D-Wave’s Advantage, which was released in September 2020. For now, customers will be able to access Advantage2 through D-Wave’s Leap cloud service, though physical machines will be deployed gradually over the next few years.

Management cited the technology’s applications in tasks such as supply-chain optimization and resource allocation, outside the realm of what classical machines could effectively handle.

Shares soared 31% to $17.23 in morning trading. The benchmark S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite were down 0.3% and 0.5%, respectively.

Trevor Lanting, the company’s chief development officer, told Barron’s that D-Wave had focused on building greater connectivity between quantum bits, or the basic units of information in a quantum machine.

“This allows us to pose more complex problems and solve them with with the technology, whether they’re business optimization problems or lattice materials,” Lanting explained.

Other improvements allowing the technology to run more efficiently, such as improved coherence and a higher energy scale, have reduced its appetite for power compared with previous generations, Lanting said.

“Fundamentally, this is energy-efficient computing for hard problems,” Lanting continued. “I think you’re going to see a lot more focus on the the energy footprint of computation over the next decade. It’s growing and it’s growing fast.”

While Advantage2 will only be accessible over the cloud for now, D-Wave plans to upgrade on-premises systems in years to come. These include the machine purchased by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in February and the system currently being installed at Davidson Technologies’ headquarters in Alabama.

CEO Alan Baratz told Barron’s that an upgrade was a “multi-month exercise.”

“We’ve got to warm up the system, we’ve got to install the new processor, we’ve got to cool down the system, we’ve got to recalibrate the system— and just the calibration process itself could take four to six months,” Baratz explained.

The CEO has been one of the most outspoken advocates of quantum technology, particularly its commercial applications. This has resulted in pushback from critics including the authors of a short report in April who alleged that the company oversold itself and made false claims about the performance of its systems. (Baratz told Barron’s that the allegations were “ridiculous” and the report itself was “full of misinformation.”)

The report came at a time when shares had already been beaten down substantially. D-Wave and peers began sliding at the end of March following Nvidia’s annual developer conference, where timelines for wide-scale deployment of the technology failed to materialize.

Investor frustration culminated in a selloff that caused some quantum stocks to see double-digit declines, D-Wave among them. The stock closed down 18% on Nvidia’s inaugural “Quantum Day.”

That wasn’t the only thing weighing on shares. Ahead of the event, D-Wave claimed it had demonstrated “quantum supremacy” after one of its systems completed a materials simulation task in 20 minutes that would’ve taken one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers nearly 1 million years.

Shares climbed on the heels of the announcement, but as scrutiny mounted those gains slipped away. The stock’s most recent ascent came on the heels of D-Wave’s first-quarter financial results, which included record revenue and a narrower quarterly loss.

The caveat about quantum pure-plays is that they are not yet profitable. This has been a pervasive issue for the industry, with stocks trading largely on headlines and sentiment.

While D-Wave didn’t turn a profit in its latest quarter, revenue increased 509% from a year earlier. Bookings, a metric representing customer orders received that are expected to generate net revenues in the future, decreased 64% to $1.6 million.

Baratz had an explanation. “We in the early stages of commercializing quantum, so as we’re getting started, bookings are going to be more lumpy as opposed to smoothly increasing,” the CEO said.

The metric can be parsed into three types of deals: professional services, quantum-as-a-service, and system sales. System sales carry a hefty price tag, to the tune of $20 to $40 million apiece, and have a longer lead time as a result.

The cost barrier is one reason why it’s difficult to determine a timeline for wide-scale deployment. Another is the sensitive nature of quantum computers themselves. As the basic units of information in a system are subatomic particles like photons or electrons, this makes them particularly sensitive to environmental interference, which can cause the machines to bungle calculations.

Until these more pervasive issues are resolved, it is unclear when quantum computing will catch on. However, the technology has the potential to dramatically transform the field of drug discovery, artificial intelligence, and the financial sector.

D-Wave, for one, is already at work on its next generation of quantum processors, with a focus on increasing qubit count to create more powerful multi-chip solutions.

‘We’re able to do calculations beyond the reach of possibility for classical systems,” Lanting told Barron’s. “There is a gap and that gap will continue to open up very rapidly. That’s the promise of quantum computing.”