D-Wave Quantum Forms Key Partnership with AT&T to Expand Quantum Computing

T has signed an agreement to expand its use of D-Wave's quantum computing technology across network operations, sending QBTS shares more than 11% higher in Monday pre-market trading and pulling other quantum names up with it. The announcement came days after D-Wave transferred its listing to Nasdaq on July 24.

The expansion rests on a result rather than a pilot commitment. AT&T applied D-Wave's annealing quantum technology to an optimisation workload and cut processing time from roughly one hour to under 15 seconds, a speed-up large enough to change what the tool can be used for operationally: a calculation that takes an hour runs overnight, while one that takes seconds can run inside a live decision loop.

From there the companies plan to explore outage response, technician routing, network planning, traffic management and potential quantum security applications. AT&T's stated initial focus is layering the annealing technology into the tools already powering its agentic AI systems, which is a more grounded framing than most quantum announcements carry, because it attaches the technology to workflows that already exist and already have measurable cost.

The caution for investors is that annealing suits a specific class of optimisation problems and does not generalise to the broader promise of fault-tolerant quantum computing, so this validates a narrow commercial use case rather than the whole category. What to watch is whether the relationship converts into disclosed contract value, and whether other carriers follow, since telecom network optimisation is exactly the kind of repeatable, high-cost problem that could give quantum vendors their first durable revenue base.

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