Wall Street Focused on D-Wave’s Earnings. Its Bigger Story Came 1 Day Before.

D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) stock went down after an earnings report that disappointed the market, even though there was considerable excitement leading up to it. The stock has struggled this year, unable to repeat the stellar performance of 2025. But looking at just the earnings report for a pre-commercial-scale quantum company isn’t the best way to judge progress. A better way is to look at the product, and that’s where investors may have lost a headline from last week amid the earnings noise.

Just a day before the earnings report, the company announced technological progress that helps it move one step closer to commercial quantum computing. To understand what just happened, let’s take a look at the bottleneck that was stopping researchers from deploying quantum computing at scale. The barrier to useful quantum computing isn’t the qubit count. The problem is that as qubit count increases, the error rates compound, making it impossible to reliably deploy these systems at scale.