Key Takeaways
- D-Wave’s quarterly revenue has stayed inside a roughly $2 million to $4 million band in seven of the last eight quarters, with the $15 million system sale booked in Q1 2025 the lone exception, even as management points to a 59% jump in Q2 bookings and 668% growth in remaining performance obligations.
- Total operating expenses climbed from $21.68 million in Q3 2024 to $54.98 million in Q2 2026, more than doubling the cost base in seven quarters while revenue essentially stood still.
- Free cash outflow nearly doubled from a roughly $16 million to $20 million quarterly range through 2024 and 2025 to $46.04 million in Q1 2026 and $32.94 million in Q2 2026.
- D-Wave still holds $546.2 million in cash, but the direction of spending, not the balance, is what determines whether the commercial momentum management describes can outrun the burn before the 2032 gate-model target arrives.
D-Wave’s Revenue Hasn’t Actually Grown Since 2024
D-Wave’s (QBTS) Q2 2026 revenue was $3.1 million, flat year over year and below the $4.02 million analysts expected. Looking back over the last eight quarters, revenue was $1.87 million in Q3 2024, $2.31 million in Q4 2024, then spiked to $15 million in Q1 2025 on a single annealing system sale before settling back to $3.10 million, $3.74 million, $2.75 million, $2.86 million and $3.08 million across the five quarters since. Strip out that one outlier and D-Wave’s top line has essentially traded sideways for two years.
That matters because the Q2 call leaned heavily on forward-looking commercial indicators rather than revenue itself: bookings up 59% to $2.1 million for the quarter, remaining performance obligations up 668% year over year to $40.7 million, and Forbes Global 2000 customers rising from 20.4% to 47.7% of revenue. Those are legitimate signals of enterprise interest. The quality of that mix is improving too: 37% of D-Wave’s first-half 2026 QCaaS revenue came from live production applications, up from 9.8% in the first half of 2025, meaning the small recurring base is shifting from proof-of-concept testing toward embedded, repeat usage
But CEO Alan Baratz guided that Q3 revenue would rise only modestly before Q4 revenue increases significantly as two annealing systems, priced in the $20 million to $40 million range per unit according to then-CFO John Markovich, are scheduled to ship. That effectively asks investors to expect another Q1-2025-style spike rather than a shift in the underlying run rate, since QCaaS subscription revenue, the recurring piece of the business, was still only $1.9 million in Q2, up 50% year over year but tiny in absolute terms.
Management has also said system revenue typically recognizes over roughly two quarters post-delivery during installation and calibration, so even a clean Q4 signing won’t necessarily land as a single-quarter revenue jump, it more likely spreads recognition into early 2027.
Why D-Wave’s Cost Base Doubled While Sales Stayed Flat
While revenue held flat, total operating expenses rose from $21.68 million in Q3 2024 to $54.98 million in Q2 2026, more than 2.5 times in seven quarters. GAAP operating expenses jumped 93% year over year in Q2 alone, and adjusted EBITDA loss widened 85% to $37.1 million, which management attributed to higher personnel costs, go-to-market investment and expenses tied to the $250 million Quantum Circuits acquisition closed in January 2026.
That mismatch is the core operating-leverage question. Revenue isn’t compounding anywhere near the rate spending is, which means bookings and RPO growth eventually have to convert into recognized revenue fast enough to catch a cost base that has already more than doubled. Management frames this spending as investment in the dual-rail gate-model architecture validated in a peer-reviewed Nature paper this quarter, targeting a Lambda of 10 error-correction efficiency, on a road map that doesn’t reach the 100 logical qubits and 1 million reliable operations threshold for commercial gate-model relevance until 2032. That’s a defensible R&D bet, but it’s a multi-year one, and the near-term P&L shows the cost of making it before the annealing business alone can carry the load.
D-Wave’s Cash Burn Is Accelerating as Leadership Changes
Free cash flow shows a similar pattern with a sharper recent turn. D-Wave burned roughly $16 million to $20 million a quarter through most of 2024 and 2025, then that outflow jumped to $46.04 million in Q1 2026 and $32.94 million in Q2 2026, a combined $79 million in the first half of the year. Annualized at that pace, D-Wave’s $546.2 million cash and marketable securities balance, down $273.1 million from a year earlier mostly due to the Quantum Circuits deal, still implies a multi-year runway, but the trend is now pointed the wrong way just as two separate leadership and ownership changes land.
John Markovich retired as CFO effective September 2, with SVP of finance Greg Golkov stepping in as acting CFO right as the burn rate accelerated. Separately, the U.S. Commerce Department, which received 7,095,721 unregistered shares at $14.09 apiece as a condition of D-Wave’s up-to-$100 million CHIPS Act award, filed a prospectus in September to register those shares for resale. With the stock at $17.70, the government’s stake already sits at a paper gain, and a resale registration landing during a CFO transition is the kind of supply overhang that doesn’t require an actual sale to weigh on sentiment.
Is D-Wave’s Commercial Story Getting Ahead of Its Financials?
The strongest conclusion the numbers support is that D-Wave’s enterprise pipeline looks genuine, the AT&T, Optum and NTT DOCOMO production deployments and the expanding Forbes Global 2000 mix are real signals, but none of it has yet shown up as durable, compounding revenue. The company is still effectively a two-to-three-system-sale-a-year business wrapped around a much smaller recurring QCaaS layer, and its cost base has already grown to a size that assumes more revenue is coming than has actually arrived. The risk isn’t insolvency; $546.2 million in cash buys time even at the current burn rate.
The risk is that D-Wave keeps spending as if the commercial inflection has already happened while the P&L keeps proving it hasn’t, stretching the gap between narrative and numbers further into a gate-model road map that doesn’t pay off until 2032.
The next two quarters are the real test. If the two Q4 system sales land and QCaaS revenue keeps compounding near its 50% year-over-year pace independent of those deals, the operating-leverage argument starts to look credible. If Q4 revenue disappoints the way Q2 did against consensus, or free cash outflow climbs past the $46 million high set in Q1 2026, the gap between D-Wave’s commercial story and its financial statements gets harder to explain away as growing pains.
Should You Invest in D-Wave Quantum Inc.?
The only way to really know is to look at the numbers yourself. TIKR gives you free access to the same institutional-quality financial data that professional analysts use to answer exactly that question.
Pull up QBTS stock and you’ll see years of historical financials, what Wall Street analysts expect for revenue and earnings in the quarters ahead, how valuation multiples have moved over time, and whether price targets are trending up or down.
You can build a free watchlist to track D-Wave Quantum Inc. alongside every other stock on your radar. No credit card required. Just the data you need to decide for yourself.
Access Professional Tools to Analyze QBTS stock on TIKR for Free →
Looking for New Opportunities?
- See what stocks billionaire investors are buying so you can follow the smart money.
- Analyze stocks in as little as 5 minutes with TIKR’s all-in-one, easy-to-use platform.
- The more rocks you overturn… the more opportunities you’ll uncover. Search 100K+ global stocks, global top investor holdings, and more with TIKR.
Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
