A single strong earnings report from one quantum computing company lit up the entire sector, raising a pointed question about whether its peers can generate comparable momentum of their own.
Rigetti Computing (NASDAQ: RGTI) and D-Wave Quantum (NYSE: QBTS) each surged 17% without releasing any company-specific news, their gains borrowed entirely from IonQ’s blowout third-quarter results.
IonQ posted quarterly revenue of $173.8 million, a 336% year-over-year increase, and lifted its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to a range of $505 to $515 million, well above the $455 million analysts had anticipated.
COO and CFO Inder Singh framed the revised outlook in sweeping terms, calling it “an industry record of more than half a billion dollars.”
The SkyWater acquisition contributed $83.5 million to that quarterly figure, meaning organic growth was substantial but not the whole story, while IonQ’s backlog more than doubled to $1.2 billion.
For Rigetti, the contrast in scale is stark: its second-quarter revenue totaled just $5.1 million, roughly one thirty-fourth of what IonQ generated in a single quarter.
Analysts nonetheless project Rigetti’s full-year 2026 revenue will more than triple to $23.3 million, with longer-range estimates reaching $83.4 million by 2028, a figure still less than half of IonQ’s most recent quarterly haul.
A critical variable sits inside that 2026 forecast: approximately $8.4 million is contingent on the installation and customer acceptance of a 108-qubit system destined for India’s C-DAC, and if that acceptance slips into 2027, more than a third of the year’s consensus estimate disappears with it.
Rigetti entered the second half needing $13.7 million in revenue to reach the full-year target, having recorded $9.5 million across the first two quarters, which leaves little room for delays.
At its last closing price, Rigetti traded at 123 times forward sales, elevated by almost any conventional measure but well below its three-year average of 225 times and a distant cry from the 1,415 times it commanded in October 2025.
D-Wave’s connection to IonQ is more structural than coincidental: through the SkyWater deal, IonQ extended a multi-year quantum manufacturing agreement directly with D-Wave, giving the company a tangible operational link to its larger peer.
D-Wave’s own trajectory has been improving, with fiscal 2025 revenue nearly tripling to $24.6 million from $8.8 million the prior year, and analysts are projecting $42.5 million for the current year and $148 million by 2028.
Both companies report earnings before the open on November 10, and the market will be watching to see whether either can show the kind of order growth that underpins those ambitious multi-year estimates.
IonQ demonstrated that enterprise and government buyers are willing to commit serious capital to quantum technology, but Rigetti and D-Wave will need to prove that demand extends meaningfully to their own platforms and pipelines.
Today’s rally was a sector-wide reaction to a peer’s success; November 10 will determine whether it was a preview or simply borrowed time.
