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Four quantum computing stocks are worth more than the industry has earned since it started keeping score. The real money is betting somewhere else entirely. |
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One Number
The collective market cap of four quantum computing stocks, against $1 billion of revenue for the entire industry in 2025. McKinsey Quantum Technology Monitor 2026 / Crunchbase, August 2026 IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave and Quantum Computing Inc — the four public, pure-play quantum computing stocks — are together worth about $36 billion. The entire quantum computing industry, every company in it, generated just over $1 billion in revenue in 2025. The market is not pricing these four companies' businesses. It is pricing an industry that does not fully exist yet. |
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One Argument Quantum computing's commercial case became real this year. Its stock price became real about two years earlier.A regular computer solves problems step by step, testing one possibility, then the next. A quantum computer uses particles that can hold multiple states at once, so it tests many possibilities in parallel. This is why the problems it targets are the ones that overwhelm ordinary computers — like optimising thousands of financial variables simultaneously, or breaking or defending the encryption banks rely on. That, at least, has been the promise for decades. This year some of the world’s biggest banks started putting real money behind testing whether it delivers. JPMorgan has put This year some of the world’s biggest banks started putting real money behind testing whether it delivers. JPMorgan has put $100 million into the quantum computing company Quantinuum and in June ran a demonstration on Quantinuum’s hardware 100 times faster than Google’s 2019 benchmark chip, Sycamore. Wells Fargo has built close to a dozen working algorithms with IBM, American Banker reports. IBM's chief executive, Arvind Krishna, told investors in July that quantum computing will add meaningfully to revenue by 2028 or 2029, and represent a trillion dollars of value by the end of the 2030s. McKinsey counts $12.6 billion invested in quantum computing in 2025 alone, six times the year before. None of that money, though, went into the stocks the retail investor could actually buy. JPMorgan bought its stake in a private company. NVIDIA, BlackRock and sovereign wealth funds are doing the same across the sector, according to PitchBook. They are writing checks into private rounds, not the public stocks. IonQ, Rigetti and D-Wave trade at 59, 398 and 542 times sales. And the people who know these three companies best are not buying. Insiders at all three have net-sold $863 million of stock over the past three years, against almost nothing bought back, reports Sean Williams of The Motley Fool. Insiders at richly valued, recently listed companies sell for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with the business — diversification, taxes, an early backer taking some early profits. However, unlike most speculative technology cycles, this one has an actual, dated result — benchmarked against a named external chip, not a vaguer press-release claim. A bank ran a real workload on real hardware and it was faster than the best classical benchmark. But that was also true of the internet in 1999. The technology arrived almost exactly as promised, but the companies that got priced were rarely the ones still around when the promise came true. Nobody has yet shown that IonQ, Rigetti or D-Wave will be the JPMorgans and IBMs of quantum computing rather than its Pets.com (one of the most spectacular failures of the dot-com boom).
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One Position Track quantum computing progress through the named deals, not the stock price. The bank investment is the real leading indicator. IonQ, Rigetti and D-Wave are trading on a story that revenue has not yet tested. I would change my mind the day one of them reports real, recurring revenue from that $12.6 billion of 2025 corporate spending. Not just another funding round raised on the promise of it. The next time quantum computing comes up in a board or client conversation, what is the one question you'd want answered before treating it as more than a buzzword? |
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