Quantum Computing Is Still Years Away. These 6 Stocks Show Who Is Closest to Real Revenue. - The Motley Fool

Over the last few years, the development of quantum computing has mostly been bankrolled by stock sales and legacy cash flows, not by customers, and the latest quarterly filings from the biggest names in that race show just how wide that gap remains. For investors, the real question isn't which companies have the coolest qubits, but which ones have the financial capacity to stay afloat for the years it will take for their quantum computing revenues to start mattering. Three numbers from the most recent quarter, straight from some quantum computing companies' own filings, show how far "someday" still is from "now." IonQ (IONQ -5.09%) booked $80.1 million in revenue for the second quarter. D-Wave Quantum (QBTS -4.60%) booked around $3 million. Rigetti Computing (RGTI -2.14%) booked $5.1 million. None of those revenue figures covered the millions the companies spend annually on hardware. So, for investors interested in this niche of the tech sector, the real question is which quantum computing stock is closest to running on revenue rather than on the next stock or debt sale. IONQ - IonQ$32.60-$1.75 (-5.09%)NYSE · As of 11:00 AM ET 10/16/26Premium FeatureMoneyball Superscore62/100Key data pointsMarket capMarket cap calculated using publicly traded shares outstanding only. Does not include unlisted, private, or dual-class non-traded shares. Implied market cap may vary.$13.92BDay's range$32.55 - $33.6452wk range$25.89 - $73.65Volume9.1MAvg volume22.2MGross margin-3,317.96% Revenue today: IBM and IonQ IBM (IBM -0.71%) doesn't report its quantum computing revenue separately, and that tells you most of what you need to know: Within the multibillion-dollar business that is IBM, the quantum computing operation still amounts to a rounding error. What IBM has instead is scale and patience. It runs 13 utility-scale quantum computing systems (100-plus qubits each), has booked more than $1 billion in cumulative quantum business, and is putting $10 billion behind its efforts to develop the technology over five years. But that effort is funded by the tens of billions of dollars in free cash flow its mainframes and software throw off every year. CEO Arvind Krishna said in a July interview on CNBC that quantum computing won't move the profit needle for his company until 2028 or 2029. But IBM can wait that long. IBM - International Business Machines$232.45-$1.67 (-0.71%)NYSE · As of 11:01 AM ET 10/16/26Premium FeatureMoneyball Superscore72/100Key data pointsMarket capMarket cap calculated using publicly traded shares outstanding only. Does not include unlisted, private, or dual-class non-traded shares. Implied market cap may vary.$220.57BDay's range$231.61 - $236.9852wk range$199.19 - $332.46Volume1.5MAvg volume6.7MGross margin57.56%Dividend yield2.88% IonQ doesn't have that luxury, but it's the one pure play in the space that's booking real revenue: $144.7 million in the first half of 2026, up from $28.3 million in the prior-year period. So what does that growth cost? The headline quarterly loss was $1.87 billion, though $1.65 billion of that was a noncash charge from revaluing warrants. The number that matters more is operating cash burn: $254.8 million over six months, nearly triple the $85.6 million it burned in the first half of 2025. IonQ had $3 billion in cash and investments on its books as of June 30, or about $2 billion once its recent SkyWater acquisition is paid for. That gives it a few years of runway at this pace, not a few quarters. But the bill is being paid in shares: The weighted average count of shares outstanding jumped by 47% year over year, from 251 million to 368 million. Each shareholder now owns a noticeably smaller piece of the company than they did a year ago. Revenue soon, and what "soon" costs: D-Wave and Rigetti D-Wave and Rigetti are smaller and earlier -- and their own numbers show exactly how early. D-Wave's second-quarter revenue was flat at $3.1 million, but bookings (signed orders not yet counted as revenue) hit $35.5 million for the first half of 2026, up over 1,120% from a year earlier. D-Wave says commercial customers made up 67.7% of its revenue in the first half of 2026, up sharply from 16% a year earlier. But within its cloud business specifically, only 37.3% of revenue came from production use; the rest came from pilot projects and testing, a reminder that "commercial" doesn't necessarily mean "in production" yet. Image source: Getty Images. Its cash cushion stood at $546.2 million as of June 30, down $273.1 million from a year ago, primarily due to cash paid for its Quantum Circuits acquisition, not to operating losses. D-Wave has leaned heavily on at-the-market stock sales to fund that gap, under a standing arrangement that lets the company sell new shares straight into the market whenever it needs cash. That keeps it funded, but steadily reduces the value of each existing share. Rigetti's story is similar. Quarterly revenue rose to $5.1 million from $1.8 million a year earlier, and it holds roughly $541 million in cash with no debt. But it has also been issuing new stock through repeated at-the-market offerings, so like D-Wave, it isn't paying the bills with customer sales yet; it's buying time with equity. RGTI - Rigetti Computing$12.36-$0.27 (-2.14%)NASDAQ · As of 10:59 AM ET 10/16/26Premium FeatureMoneyball Superscore51/100Key data pointsMarket capMarket cap calculated using publicly traded shares outstanding only. Does not include unlisted, private, or dual-class non-traded shares. Implied market cap may vary.$4.22BDay's range$12.17 - $12.6052wk range$11.11 - $48.25Volume5.3MAvg volume18MGross margin-3,975.14% The enablers: Google and Nvidia aren't selling quantum yet Alphabet and Nvidia are excluded from this scorecard because neither sells quantum computers as a business line today. Alphabet's Willow chip has achieved some impressive test results, but access to it outside the company is still limited to select researchers, per The Quantum Insider. Nvidia isn't building qubits at all. It's focusing its efforts instead on providing key support systems -- chiefly NVQLink, a system that connects quantum processors to Nvidia's GPUs; and CUDA-Q, the software platform that allows unified programs to be run across hardware that combines quantum and classical processors. More than a dozen supercomputing centers and 17 quantum hardware makers have adopted NVQLink, but Nvidia doesn't break out what that's worth, because right now, it probably isn't much. Both Alphabet and Nvidia are positioned to profit once quantum computing works at commercial scale. Neither offers proof that it does yet. So, what does all this mean for quantum computing investors? IBM has the balance sheet to fund a long wait. IonQ has real, fast-growing revenue, but it bought those sales with heavy cash burn and serious dilution. D-Wave and Rigetti have promising bookings, but their revenues are still tiny next to their cash burns, and they're covering the gap by printing new shares. Alphabet and Nvidia are well positioned bystanders, not yet quantum revenue stories. In my opinion, the numbers favor IBM for balance sheet durability, IonQ for actual commercial traction, and perhaps Nvidia if it lets investors look into its quantum operations over the next couple of years.