D-Wave’s Year in Review: 2025 Wins Set the Stage for 2026

Key Points

• D-Wave Quantum shares more than tripled in 2025, a testament to the many business, financial, and technological achievements the company made last year.
• With its expansion into gate-model tech, D-Wave may have eased the fears some investors had about its particular focus within the quantum computing landscape being too narrow to be widely marketable.
• Still, despite the successes of last year, D-Wave still faces an uphill battle when it comes to continuing to grow revenue and to achieving profitability.

For all of its many achievements in 2025, D-Wave Quantum Inc. NYSE: QBTS remains a speculative and controversial investment. The much-hyped quantum computing firm more than tripled in value in the last year with returns of more than 232%, but it has a fairly high short interest of 12.47% of the public float, meaning that a sizable number of investors are skeptical that the firm will be able to maintain its trajectory. Indeed, QBTS shares are down about 30% from their all-time high achieved in October 2025.

Nonetheless, there is still a strong bullish case to be made for D-Wave based on its track record over the last year. From major new contracts and partnerships to financial successes to promising technological advances, 2025 was a critical period for the company as it attempted to jockey for leadership among a competitive field of quantum computing firms. Taken together, these developments may point toward continued success in the year to come—although investors should also beware lingering risks.

D-Wave's Business and Financial Wins in 2025

D-Wave has noted some major business successes in the last year, including new partnerships with Carahsoft Technology, Japan Tobacco, Yonsei University and Incheon Metropolitan City, and more. Its collaboration with the North Wales Police demonstrated the dominance of the company's hybrid-quantum approach to a problem involving the optimization of the placement of police vehicles. These partnerships help to prove to investors that D-Wave's products have real-world applications and that the company may appeal to a wider variety of business and institutional clients going forward.

One factor driving the continued hype surrounding D-Wave is its financials, which have continued to be strong despite a sometimes tepid response from investors. In the third quarter of 2025, the latest quarter the company has reported, revenue doubled year-over-year (YOY), bookings improved significantly, and liquidity remained among the best in the industry. With more than $836 million in consolidated cash as of the end of that quarter, D-Wave headed to the end of the year in the enviable position of being able to send funds toward R&D, one or more acquisitions, or any number of other goals. In the first days of 2026, the company demonstrated how it will use a large portion of that cash when it announced plans to acquire rival quantum firm Quantum Circuits for $550 million in cash and stock.

Technological Breakthroughs Position D-Wave For Success in 2026

2025 was also a big year for D-Wave's technological advances, starting with a quantum supremacy breakthrough early in the year. The company's sixth-generation quantum computing system, Advantage2, launched in the spring and quickly racked up sales to prominent customers. D-Wave also notably expanded outside of its traditional annealing approach to quantum computing with ventures into the more traditional strategy of gate-model. Its cryogenic packaging development initiative, announced over the summer in partnership with NASA, has already yielded promising results in the new year.

For a company like D-Wave, short sellers worry that annealing technology—which is known for being able to quickly solve complex optimization problems but which may lack versatility—could limit the firm's commercialization prospects. After D-Wave confirmed its expansion into gate-model technology in recent quarters, these concerns may be less prominent in 2026.

Reasons to Be Cautious Remain

With all of these noteworthy wins, there are still reasons investors might think twice before buying QBTS shares at the start of 2026. First, the massive rally has only made D-Wave increasingly overvalued by some estimations—the company has a price-to-sales ratio of a whopping 1,237, for example, and a price-to-book ratio of 135.6.

Perhaps more importantly, though, D-Wave remains unprofitable, and revenue—despite its rapid growth—is still minuscule. The company has so far won revenue gains thanks to a small number of large sales of its quantum systems to heavy-hitting clients, but it is unlikely to achieve real, scalable revenue and profitability until it is able to make sales to smaller business customers.

How long it might take for quantum tech to achieve that level of accessibility is difficult to say, and it's also unclear exactly what kinds of applications D-Wave's technology might have for a much wider market of potential customers. If in 2026 the company is able to make breakthroughs on these questions, the new year could make 2025's successes look modest by comparison.