BID TerminalOpen complete report
Research library Semis & Hardware

Back of Napkin

D-Wave Quantum Inc. QBTS

Three-pass checkedFresh as companies report

The bet you're really making is that companies keep paying D-Wave to solve hard scheduling and logistics problems with its quantum machines, and that a handful of paying customers turns into hundreds. You're betting its older annealing approach keeps winning real work before IBM's and Google's newer machines, or ordinary computers, do the same job cheaper. Right now it looks shaky: revenue runs about $3 million a quarter, one customer is 41% of it, and last year's growth came almost entirely from a single machine sale. You pay about $6 billion, roughly 500 times trailing sales, for a company that has never earned a profit and burns cash every quarter.

Key data

Price$16.58
52-week range$12.75 – $46.75
Price / sales, TTM490x
Price / book5.7x

QBTS · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$-2$9$19$30$41 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jul '25Feb '26Sep '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

D-Wave sells quantum computing two ways: the physical Advantage2 machine placed on-premises, and Leap, a cloud subscription where customers rent time to run optimization problems, the kind of scheduling, routing and portfolio math that grows ugly fast on ordinary computers. It is the annealing specialist, a narrower and older design than the gate-model machines IBM, Google and IonQ are building, and it has now added its own gate-model line. The pitch is that annealing is useful for real commercial work today, not a decade out. More than 100 organizations across commercial, government and research sectors touch it. The moat, such as it is, is a fifteen-year head start in annealing hardware and the switching friction once a customer builds a workflow on Leap. The problem is that almost nobody has yet decided quantum is worth paying real money for.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

Continue with QBTS

Get the complete Back of Napkin free.

Choose this as your free complete report. No card required.

Read the complete report

More company research

View all research
IonQ, Inc. IONQThe bet you're really making is that quantum computers stop being lab experiments and start doing paid work, and that IonQ's trapped-ion machines, the kind Amazon and Nvidia already plug into, are the ones customers keep buying. You're betting the $485 million of orders already on the books turns into cash before IonQ runs low, because it spends far more than it earns and fills the gap by printing new stock. Right now sales are exploding, $80 million last quarter, nearly four times a year earlier, yet the company lost money running the business every single quarter and those losses keep growing. You pay about 60 times sales, because there are no profits to price, and even on the revenue Wall Street sees three years out, still 23 times. Back of Napkin Quantinuum Inc. Class A Common Stock QNTThe bet you're really making is that quantum computing becomes a real business, and that Quantinuum's machines, which trap single atoms with lasers to run the math, are the ones customers pay for first. You're betting the biggest buyer, the U.S. government, keeps writing checks, and that the $2.1 billion in the bank lasts long enough to find out. Right now it is tiny: $8 million of sales last quarter, almost quadruple a year ago, against a $555 million operating loss. You pay almost 1,000 times last year's sales, and the stock has fallen 43% from its high since listing this year. Back of Napkin Applied Optoelectronics, Inc. AAOIThe bet you're really making is that Amazon and the other giant cloud companies keep buying Applied Optoelectronics' optical transceivers, the laser-based plugs that move data as light between AI chips in data centers, and that the company can build enough of them to finally make money. You are betting it turns a revenue explosion into its first real profit in nearly a decade before the flood of new stock it is selling waters you down. Right now the revenue part is going very well, with one thing to watch: sales jumped 86% from a year ago to the biggest quarter ever, but the profit on each dollar of sales is shrinking, from 30.3 cents to 27.7 cents, and on the official scorecard the company still lost $22.8 million. You pay 14 times sales, and 19 times what Wall Street guesses it earns in 2027, for a company that has not earned a full-year profit since 2017. Back of Napkin SK hynix Inc. SKHYThe bet you're really making is that the world keeps building AI data centers, and keeps buying SK Hynix's memory chips to feed the processors that run those models. You're betting SK Hynix stays the top supplier of HBM, the stacked memory bonded right next to Nvidia's chips, and that memory prices stay high instead of collapsing the way they always have. Right now it is going better than at any point in the company's history: profit per share ran from ₩1,250 to ₩8,760 in four quarters, each above forecast, with the most recent two quarters landing 50% and 71% ahead of consensus. You pay about 8 times trailing twelve-month earnings, and closer to 5 times if this quarter's pace holds, the least the stock has ever cost on profit, because everyone knows memory earnings peak right before they fall. Back of Napkin