QBTS Stock: The Case for Buying the Most Misunderstood Quantum Company on the NYSE

Right now, D-Wave Quantum is genuinely perplexing. The company recently revealed a 179% increase in revenue for the 2025 fiscal year. It has an 82.6% gross margin. It had $884.5 million in cash at the end of the year, a nearly 400% increase from the previous year. The stock has been rated as a Strong Buy by fifteen analysts, with an average price target of $32 to $39. Nevertheless, the stock is currently trading at $14.57, down about 47% year to date and more than 68% from its 52-week high of $46.75 earlier this year. Even seasoned investors pause and question what they’re missing when there is such a disconnect between market price and operational progress.

D-Wave is neither a brand-new business nor a speculative startup put together around a PowerPoint. It was established in 1999 in Burnaby, British Columbia, and has been producing and marketing quantum computers for a longer period of time than nearly any other business worldwide. Instead of keeping the technology in a research lab, it claims to be the first commercial quantum computing company, the first to actually place a quantum machine in front of paying customers.

This background is important because it gives D-Wave an advantage over its rivals: more than ten years of practical deployment experience, client connections, and operational data regarding the real-world applications of quantum computing. Clients in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, logistics, and financial services have utilized the company’s annealing-based quantum systems to solve optimization problems that are difficult for traditional computers to handle. It’s not a pitch. That’s a history.

NYSE: QBTS · Quantum Computing

The gap between what D-Wave can do now and what the market had priced in at $46 a share earlier this year has become painfully apparent. This is the real issue, which the stock price is loudly expressing. Both EPS and revenue projections were significantly missed by the Q4 2025 earnings report. Although about $270 million of that amount came from non-cash warrant valuation effects rather than operational cash burn, the GAAP net loss increased to $355 million.

There was a $100 million operating loss. In a market where rising yields and geopolitical tension have been pushing capital toward safety, institutional investors who are already wary of high-valuation, pre-profitability technology stocks will find it difficult to defend any of those figures. D-Wave had a rough exit after becoming entangled in a rotation out of speculative technology.

In a broad sector review, Mizuho Securities analyst Vijay Rakesh lowered his price target for QBTS from $40 to $31 last week, bringing IonQ and Rigetti Computing down with it. The news caused all three stocks to drop by about 4%. However, it’s important to note that Rakesh maintained his Outperform rating.

The target cut did not indicate that D-Wave’s business is broken; rather, it was a reflection of revised assumptions regarding near-term commercialization timelines and sector-wide valuation adjustments following developments at NVIDIA’s GTC conference. In addition to highlighting NVQLink, a technology that enables hybrid workflows combining quantum and classical computing, as a significant advancement for the industry, the analyst is still optimistic about the long-term trajectory. Over the next four years, the UK is anticipated to invest about $2.7 billion in quantum computing. For defense-related quantum programs, Canada is contributing about $1 billion. In fact, the global funding environment is getting better.

Observing the QBTS chart over the last few months gives the impression that the market is both cognizant of the company’s real progress and extremely unsure of how to value it. The forward price-to-sales ratio stands at about 111 times, an extraordinary multiple that either represents a reasonable wager on a market that doesn’t yet exist at scale but will, or it represents irrational exuberance about the near-term commercial impact of quantum computing. In contrast, even though it’s still speculative, IonQ trades at about 45 times forward sales, which seems more palatable.

On the basis of its current financials alone, D-Wave’s valuation premium over its closest peer is difficult to defend. It necessitates the conviction that D-Wave has a long-term competitive advantage over IonQ and others due to its annealing architecture and the gate-model capabilities it acquired from Quantum Circuits in January 2026. That might be the case. It’s also possible that until the revenue figures match the promise, the market is justified in its skepticism.

This month, the company launched a podcast series titled “Quantum Matters,” which is hosted by Vice President Murray Thom and covers applications of quantum technology in manufacturing, supply chain, aerospace, and life sciences. It’s a minor issue, but it speaks to a business attempting to raise awareness in an industry where the majority of enterprise buyers are still unable to articulate the precise problem that quantum computing would solve for them.

A recent announcement of an eight-figure enterprise contract indicates that at least some buyers have figured that out. The current $14 stock price raises the question of whether the second half of 2026 will produce the revenue ramp that management is anticipating and that analysts are counting on in their price targets. The money is there. The architecture is authentic. The wait is still ongoing.