The argument for quantum computing investors is largely focused on hardware, as companies race to achieve increasingly impressive qubit counts and error rates. Although technologies are still largely untested in commercial applications, there is also a great deal of debate over which architecture—from annealing to trapped-ion and more—is most promising.
While this debate assumes that the company building the most powerful quantum device will win the market, it obscures the element that may be poised to actually generate increasing revenue for companies, including D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NASDAQ: QBTS), Rigetti Computing (NASDAQ: RGTI), and Quantum Computing Inc. (NASDAQ: QUBT): the software and cloud layer, and more specifically, Quantum Computing as a Service, or QCaaS.
