D-Wave Riding The Dual-Rail For Its Gate-Model Quantum Ambitions

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D-Wave Riding The Dual-Rail For Its Gate-Model Quantum Ambitions

Jeff Burt

Jeff<br>Burt

Published<br>wed 10 Jun 2026 // 05:05 UTC

D-Wave is something of an anomaly in a quantum computing industry. While companies ranging from hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services to traditional enterprise system makers like IBM, Dell Technologies, Cisco Systems, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are trying to get some revenue, and pure-play vendors, software and algorithm specialists, and cybersecurity firms are establishing themselves and looking toward the near future. But D-Wave has a growing business already in place that is bringing in millions of dollars.<br>Company executives years ago embraced annealing quantum technology as the shortest path to get to market, and initially made its Advantage and then Advantage2 quantum system accessible through its Leap quantum cloud service. Early last year, the vendor began selling systems to organizations, like Jülich Supercomputing Centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) in Germany, to deploy on-site. More recently, Florida Atlantic University (FAU) agreed to buy a 5,000-qubit Advantage system for $20 million.

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It seems to be working. In the first quarter, this year, D-Wave showed closed bookings of $33.4 million, a 1,994 percent year-over-year jump and a 149 percent increase over the previous quarter. Included in all of that was not only the deal with FAU but a two-year, $10 million quantum computing-as-a-service deal with a Fortune 100 company.<br>Banging The Gate-Model Drum<br>More recently, D-Wave has been making more noise around its dual-platform strategy, in particular its plans for gate-model quantum systems leveraging the superconducting modality that others like IBM, Google, and IonQ favor. The company made a significant move in that direction when it closed its $550 million deal for ten-year-old Quantum Circuits and its dual-rail error correction technology.<br>As we wrote earlier this year, the dual-rail qubit architecture embeds error detection directly into the qubits, which D-Wave executives say not only improves the quality of the qubits themselves but means that a logical qubit could be created with fewer physical qubits, which should accelerate the development of fault-tolerant quantum systems. While other vendors are focusing on the number of qubits, D-Wave is aiming to reduce errors at the hardware level by embedding error correction onto the qubits themselves to errors can be found during computation at the single-qubit level.

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The Dual-Rail Way<br>This way, the dual-rail qubits can identity about 90 percent of errors has they pop up, so fewer physical qubits are needed. D-Wave executives also boast of reaching – with error detection – 99.9 percent two-qubit fidelities, so physical errors occur about once in every 1,000 operations. The company is leaning on the Lambda metric for measuring how quickly a computer's errors decrease as more error-correction capabilities are added. According to D-Wave, the norm for most quantum companies is a value of 2, which means each error correction cuts the number of errors by half. D-Wave is looking at a Lambda value of 10, which executives say will reduce errors more quickly by a factor of 10X for each increment, which will lead to fault-tolerant quantum computing that needs significantly fewer physical qubits.<br>The dual-rail technology dovetails well with D-Wave’s superconducting expertise and its desire to manufacture the systems at scale, according to D-Wave chief development officer Trevor Lanting.<br>“We saw an immense amount of synergy between this core qubit technology, which really we see as game-changing because it really shrinks the physical requirements to get the full tolerance, but it doesn't take us in a 90-degree direction,” Lanting tells The Next Platform. “This is parallel to the direction we're going with both our annealing and our demo architectures, which is to use superconducting devices to build out these quantum computing systems.”

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An Expanded Timeline<br>With the merger complete, D-Wave is rolling out an expanded timeline for its gate-model systems. When the deal was announced in January, D-Wave laid out a partial timeline that included the general availability of a 17-qubit, dual-rail transmon-based system this year, a 49-qubit system next year, and 181-quibit quantum computer in 2028. The system will deliver 2,000-fold error reduction factor over the physical error rate and will be the blueprint for scalable fault-tolerant architectures. The company also will complete the design for a 1,000-qubit that year.<br>Earlier this month, D-Wave announced that in 2030 it will complete a 10-logical-quibit system that can support the first fault-tolerant algorithms, and two years later will launch a 100-logical-qubit system that will be able to...