Quantum computing vendors IonQ and D-Wave Quantum touted strong bookings for 2024 and the fourth quarter and said systems are showing near-term usefulness and commercial potential. The disclosures were timed to counter Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's take that useful quantum computing systems were 15- to 30-years away.
Huang made the quantum computing comments at CES 2025 in a Q&A with analysts. Specifically, Huang said:
"Someday we'll have very useful quantum computers. We're probably five or six orders of magnitudes away, 15 years for useful quantum computers and that would be on the early side. 30 years is probably on the late side. If you picked 20 years a whole bunch of us would believe it."
Huang's comments cratered quantum computing stocks such as IonQ, Righetti Systems and D-Wave were halved in intraday trading. Quantum stocks took off in late 2023 after Google touted quantum computing gains and AWS announced services to help enterprises prepare for use cases. Even after the stock hit, quantum companies are overvalued due to the immaturity of the market.
For instance, D-Wave said 2024 bookings will top $23 million, up 120% from a year ago. Fourth quarter bookings will be at least $18 million, up 500% from a year ago. Keep in mind that bookings take time to convert to revenue. For the nine months ended Sept. 30, D-Wave reported revenue of $6.52 billion.
D-Wave CEO Dr. Alan Baratz said, "Jensen Huang has a misunderstanding of quantum" and D-Wave's approach is useful today.
- Practical quantum computing advances ramp up going into 2025
- Quantum computing all in on hybrid HPC with classical computing
IonQ CEO Peter Chapman said the company will hit the high end of its bookings and revenue guidance for 2024. Chapman added that IonQ expects to be profitable with revenue approaching $1 billion by 2030. Chapman said IonQ's current quantum systems are "already providing insight to solutions for customers today" with more powerful systems coming in 2025.
More: IonQ’s bet on commercial quantum computing working, acquires Quibitekk | IonQ's quantum computing bets: Quantum for LLM training, chemistry and enterprise use cases
IonQ is the most mature of the pure play quantum companies with 2024 revenue between $38.5 million and $42.5 million.
For comparison, Righetti Computing revenue for the nine months ended Sept. 30 was $8.52 million.
What's a CxO to do?
Like any emerging technology, there's the Wall Street story, which often runs ahead of reality, and the enterprise planning story.
The enterprise story revolves around cloud providers providing quantum computing instances to test. And companies in certain industries--chemistry, biology and finance--can make use of quantum today.
CxOs need to plan ahead and think through use case for quantum computing. And established enterprise vendors are increasingly becoming quantum technology players. For instance, IBM is networking its Heron quantum systems together and can provide value today. Either way, quantum computing is going to be accessible via your cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud whether they offer their own quantum systems or access pure play offerings.
Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, has been covering quantum computing in recent years. Mueller said it makes sense for CxOs to stay focused on learning the technology (there are multiple approaches) and use cases that can add value. The rest is noise.
He said:
"If GenAI did not happen, we would all talk about quantum. With quantum encryption already working and delivering its first use case, more use cases are around the corner. All eyes are on IBM to see if the coupling of the Heron processors will work. If it does, quantum use cases will become relevant for enterprises in 2025. Planning and simulation are the horizontal use cases, protein folding and chemical engineering are the vertical ones. CxOs need to get their enterprise ready by moving the relevant data to their cloud of choice (and before assessing the quantum plans of that cloud vendor)."
More:
- IBM upgrades IBM Quantum Data Center with Heron
- IBM Boosts the Software Side of Quantum
- Quantinuum, Microsoft claim quantum reliability breakthrough
- Microsoft claims hybrid quantum breakthrough with Quantinuum, partners with Atom Computing
- Quantinuum raises $300 million, valued at $5 billion
- Quantum Brilliance, Oak Ridge National Laboratory aims to meld quantum computing, HP
