D-Wave Quantum’s stock has run up 4,900% over the past three years, but the quantum computing company is heading into its next earnings report with a far less forgiving backdrop. The shares, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker QBTS, have fallen 36% over the past six months even after a 40% jump in April.
That swing has put fresh focus on whether D-Wave can keep turning headline-grabbing customer wins into a steadier business. The company, which sells quantum computers and quantum-computing cloud services, posted $15 million in sales in the first quarter of 2025 and a loss of $0.02 per share, with part of that revenue coming from the sale of its first Advantage quantum computer system to a research center.
Analysts expect a much smaller quarter ahead. Consensus estimates call for just $4.1 million in sales in the first quarter of 2026, along with a loss of $0.08 per share. That comes as D-Wave finished 2025 with $884 million in liquidity, but also a $355 million loss, underscoring how much cash the company has on hand even as it continues to burn through capital.
The long-term pitch is still enormous. McKinsey & Co. has said the quantum computing market could be worth $2.7 trillion by 2035, a forecast that helps explain why investors continue to look past the company's uneven results. D-Wave recently signed a $10 million deal with an undisclosed Fortune 100 company for its Leap quantum-computing-as-a-service offering over the next two years, and Florida Atlantic University also signed a $20 million deal for the company’s quantum-classical hybrid service and Advantage system.
Even with those contracts, D-Wave still has about 135 individual customers, a reminder that the business remains small relative to the market it hopes to address. Revenue can be inconsistent because big quantum computer sales do not happen every quarter, while cloud-service revenue is described as fairly consistent. That mix leaves the company with significant losses and no clear consensus on when it might become profitable. For now, qbts stock is still trading on the promise of a much bigger future than its current numbers can justify.
