D-Wave Quantum's stock tanked over 10% in premarket trading Thursday after the quantum computing company missed on both revenue and earnings. Q2 pulled in $3.07 million when Wall Street expected $4.03 million. The loss per share landed at $0.13 against a consensus of $0.09. Shares slipped to $18.80 from the prior close of $21.39.
The double miss stung partly because the setup looked promising. Days before earnings, D-Wave published research in Nature showing a two-qubit gate hitting 99.9% fidelity, a technical milestone. The company also clinched a new quantum computing deal with Nasdaq Verafin for financial crime detection. Wedbush had just initiated coverage with an Outperform rating and a $40 price target.
Wall Street had penciled in about 39% sequential revenue growth from Q1's $2.9 million. Management's own framing of the revenue cycle as "lumpy" offers some cover, but the gap still hurt. Meanwhile, rival IonQ rose 4.9% the same day after posting a 300% quarterly revenue jump and raising full-year guidance.
The bookings boom tells another story
Dig past the top-line mess and the quarter shows different momentum. Bookings exploded 1,120% year-over-year to $35.5 million for the first half of 2026, a metric the company defines as customer orders expected to convert into future revenue. That's the kind of surge that typically foreshadows revenue acceleration, assuming the business actually closes deals at the expected pace.
Net loss contracted sharply to $48 million from $167 million a year prior. Operating loss did widen to $53.3 million from $26.5 million, but management pinned that on higher spending in product development and go-to-market efforts, not core business weakness.
Wall Street reaction and what's next
The market clearly discounted the bookings narrative in favor of the immediate miss. Analysts have modeled a company in the messy middle of commercialization, where revenue scales unevenly but the pipeline grows. The question is whether that pipeline actually converts or sits on the books like unfulfilled promises.
D-Wave counts defense contractors among its customers, a segment known for slow procurement cycles but sticky contracts once signed. That customer mix might explain both the lumpiness and the ambitious bookings figures.
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