AT&T Expands D-Wave Quantum Deal, Cutting an Hour-Long Workload to 15 Seconds

AT&T signed an agreement to expand its use of D-Wave's annealing quantum computing across network operations. The anchor result: an optimization workload that previously took about an hour now completes in under 15 seconds. Planned extensions cover outage response, technician routing, network planning, traffic management and quantum security.

T has signed an agreement to expand its use of QBTS D-Wave's annealing quantum computing technology across its network operations. The anchor result is unusually concrete for this sector: an optimization workload that previously took about an hour now completes in under 15 seconds.

The expansion moves quantum annealing out of pilot status and into AT&T's production tooling. The two companies plan to extend it to outage response, technician routing, network planning, traffic management and potential quantum-security use cases. AT&T's stated approach is to layer the annealing technology into the tools already powering its agentic AI stack, which the carrier credits with reducing customer downtime by 12 million hours in 2025.

Shares of D-Wave rose on the announcement. The commercial significance is the shape of the deal rather than its disclosed size: this is a named, in-production optimization workload at a Fortune 100 carrier rather than a research collaboration, which is precisely the line quantum-computing revenue models have struggled to cross.

The counterweight is concentration. A single flagship customer carries outsized weight in D-Wave's commercial narrative, and annealing addresses combinatorial optimization specifically rather than the general-purpose gate-model workloads that underpin the sector's longer-term projections. The tell to watch is whether the additional use cases named here convert into disclosed bookings in coming quarters, or stay in the press-release layer.

Related Stocks

QBTS
T