D-Wave Qubits 2026 - Opening Keynote

Please welcome to the stage, President and CEO, Dr. Alan Barretts.

[music]

Good morning. Welcome to CUBITS 2026 and welcome to beautiful Boca Raton, Florida. It's a real pleasure for me to be here today speaking with all of you and I very much appreciate you all taking the time to be here with us today, especially those of you that had to deal with weather and delayed travel.

We have a lot to talk about today. So over the course of roughly the next hour and a half, we're going to cover everything from technology through to business growth. And I think you're going to find it really interesting and really exciting.

So 2025 was the international year of quantum and a lot of progress was made over the course of the year. We saw technology progress with, for example, Google's Willow demonstration, the first time that anybody had actually shown that gate model error correction can work to increasing cubit fidelities to new ways of doing error correction like dual rail or QLDPC.

We also saw a lot of P business progress. We saw a growth in cloud-based sales and growth in system sales. And of course, for the public quantum companies, the independent public quantum companies, we saw a dramatic increase in valuation, ending the year with a combined 37 billion value across the four public independent quantum computing companies, over a 100% increase.

It was also a very important year for D-Wave. First of all, we launched our Advantage 2 quantum computer, arguably the largest and most powerful quantum computer in the world with over 4,500 cubits. We demonstrated for the first time ever quantum supremacy on a useful realworld problem using that quantum computer. We saw multiple customers move applications into production using our systems in support of their daily business operations. And we saw system sales. We saw the first sale of an advantage 2 quantum computer to the ULIC supercomputing center in Germany. And we saw the purchase of 50% capacity of an advantage to quantum computer as a part of the Q alliance in Ko Italy.

And of course we culminated the year well actually it slipped into the first week of this year by announcing the acquisition of quantum circuits which brings very important revolutionary gate model quantum computing technology to D-Wave and as a result the quantum game just changed.

D-Wave is now the world's leading quantum computing company. We were always the world's leading annealing quantum computing company. The only company that has annealing systems that have achieved supremacy and that can support commercial business operations. But now with the acquisition of quantum circuits, we have moved D-Wave to a leadership position in gate model quantum computing as well. And you're going to hear quite a bit more about that over the course of the coming hour and a half.

But as a result, we believe that 2026 will be the international year for D-Wave quantum. We will continue to make significant progress on our annealing quantum systems toward a 100,000 cubit system. You will see significant progress in the gate model arena. We already have an 8 cubit gate model system operational in New Haven, Connecticut. We'll have a 17 cubit version of that processor available later this year. and both commercial in the marketplace.

You will see progress on large enterprise quantum compute as a service deal deals. In fact, um we just closed one for $10 million. Our first large enterprise quantum compute as a service deal. You'll see continued progress in system sales. We just announced that we have sold a system to Florida Atlantic University here in Boca Raton for $20 million and increasing US government interest in D-Wave and adoption of D-Wave technology both annealing and gate model.

So D-Wave is now the only quantum computing company in the world that has a dual platform strategy both analing and gate. What this means is that we are the only quantum computing company that can address the full market for quantum. In some sense, it also means that overnight we doubled the total addressable market that D-Wave can address going from primarily analing to now analing and gate. It also means that we are now customers onestop shop for quantum computing. If you have use cases that require a kneeling, we've got you covered. If you have use cases that require a gate, we've got you covered there as well. And we're already starting to see some synergies between the two as some of our analing customers have expressed an interest in learning more about our new gate model systems because they have use cases that they believe can benefit from that technology as well.

And that means that we now have a very comprehensive product roadmap. Annealing gate and software. On the annealing front, we've talked about this before. Our advantage 2 system is in the market today. An advantage 2 performance update will be available shortly, providing some really exciting new features like reverse anneal, multiolor annealing, the ability to incorporate some digital controls into the analog fabric on the way to that 100,000 cubit advantage 3 system.

On the gate model side, I already mentioned we have an 8 cubit system operational. Today we will have a 17 cubit system before the end of this year, 49 cubits next year, 181 cubits the following year on the way to a fully scaled error corrected system with 100 logical cubits. And from a software perspective, we continue to make great progress with our Stride hybrid solver. We now have the Acumen software platform for supporting the gate model uh systems. We will be integrating the software environment and the systems into our leap cloud service and we'll be working on how to best integrate our quantum systems both analing and gate into high performance computing environments.

So today as I mentioned we are commercial. We are delivering real value real ROI to customers in helping them to solve important business applications. In some cases reducing time to solve, in some cases improving solutions, in some cases reducing the cost to solve, but in all cases helping to drive better decision making and improved operational excellence. And that is today. Not 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, but right now today that is happening as evidenced by, as I mentioned previously, a $10 million 2-year enterprise quantum compute as a service uh agreement uh with a customer to support multiple applications, including moving into production over the next two years.

As we look to the future, there are revolutionary problems that we know are on the horizon that need to be solved, waiting to be solved, and can only be solved by quantum computing. This is where both our annealing and our gate model systems will be able to deliver value. But especially on the gate model side as we look at things like quantum chemistry to be able to develop designer drugs and improve patient outcomes or new materials development for example developing for everlasting batteries or very lightweight airframes. global weather modeling. These are the revolutionary applications that will be enabled over time.

So let's talk for a minute about the acquisition of quantum circuits. This is a perfect marriage. D-Wave is the world's leading annealing quantum computing company. the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy on a useful problem and the first commercial truly commercial quantum computing company. Admittedly mostly on the analing side. Quantum circuits brings to us three decades. Three decades of superconducting gate model technology breakthroughs primarily done at Yale University and then brought into quantum circuits as a spin out of Yale. This is a worldleading developer of gate model technology that we believe will catapult D-Wave to the forefront in the gate model arena. And we're going to spend some time now talking about what that acquisition is really all about, why it's so revolutionary, and why it's so transformational.

In just a minute, there are two people that are going to join me on stage. Trevor Lanting, our chief development officer at D-Wave, and Robert Schiloff. Rob is the founding director of the Yale Quantum Institute. He's Sterling Professor of Applied Physics at Yale. He's a member of the National Academy of Scientists and he's now D-Wave Chief Scientist. He's an award-winning expert in the field of superconducting quantum computing with practical error correction. In fact, Rob is responsible for the development of the transmon cubit which is what pretty much everybody in the superconducting gate model space is using today. But Rob knew there was a better way and his work has led to the dual rail cubit around which he founded quantum circuits which is now a part of D-Wave.

So with that I'd like to ask Rob and Trevor to join me here on stage.

[applause]

[applause]

Hi Rob. Trevor. Okay, Rob's going to start by spending a few minutes talking about the dual rail cubit technology and the significance and importance. Rob,

>> thanks Alan. So, at Quantum Circuits, now D-Wave New Haven,

[clears throat]

we've created an entirely new paradigm for superconducting cubits that we call the dual rail. The dual rail is unique because it's something called an eraser cubit, which means that as a composite object, it can actually detect in the hardware when errors occur. So, let me just sketch out for you how that works. What we do is we store the quantum information as a single microwave photon that's in one of two superconducting resonators, say left and right, and then you have a zero and you have a one. But the dominant errors are that occasionally the photon is lost and we're able to detect that uh and know sort of individually at the hardware level when an error occurs in the device. Uh this gives a sort of a dualuse uh approach for these cubits. First they function as very high performance individual physical cubits after you post select away the dominant errors. The second is this extra information that you gain by knowing when errors occur allows you to use them in error correction codes and gives us a faster and more efficient path to fully fault tolerant quantum computers and it's been really exciting. This is a brand new concept uh just a couple of years old but it's made very rapid advances and we already have our prototype seeker system with eight dual rails that's functioning in New Haven and is in the hands of our uh alpha customers.

So let me tell you a little bit more about sort of you know how to compare this new modality uh with the other types of uh quantum systems that are out there. So two of the critical metrics for a uh gate model system are the execution speed and the performance the fidelity of the operations. And typically the different types of cubits fall into one of two corners. you have uh ions or neutral atoms that uh can have inherently high fidelities, good performance, but they suffer from a rather slow millisecond clock speed. On the other hand, you have the traditional superconducting approaches that are microscond clock speeds, much faster, but are typically rather errorprone. And the dual wave as you the dual rail as you see uh lies in this sort of uh most desirable quadrant where we have the fidelity and the performance that you usually associate with the trapped ions let's say but with the speed and the scalability of superconducting platforms. So uh we're really excited about this combination. the the dual rail is in a position where it's really uh time to accelerate our development and uh begin scaling these systems aggressively and with this combination with D-Wave uh and our new family, we're really excited to be able to make rapid progress on that roadmap.

>> Thanks Rob.

>> Yeah, but it's not just about error correction. We're talking about needing many many cubits to be commercially viable. So we have to worry about scaling and other factors as well. And Trevor now is going to spend a few minutes talking about some of the other technologies that we've been working on at DWave to bring together with the dual rail technology to really accelerate gate model progress. Trevor,

>> thanks Alan and thanks Rob. One of the things that we're incredibly excited about is that D-Wave brings technology and quantum circuits bring technology and there's a real synergy between these technologies that will allow us to be the first to bring to market a scaled error corrected game model quantum computer. Superconducting approaches have an inherent long-term advantage. We can engineer strong interactions between superconducting devices. And as Rob said, this means that we have fast state operations up to a thousand times faster some of the other than some of the other Cuba modalities. At D-Wave, from the beginning in our kneeling development effort, we've invested in onchip cryogenic control and we're starting to invest in high performance superconducting interconnects that will interconnect integrated circuits together. Both of these critical technologies are going to unlock largecale analing processors and we're adapting them for the dual rail technology as well. Rob spoke about the advantages of the dual rail approach. Really what this offers is the ability to detect errors and really drive up your fidelities as well as being able to encode logical cubits with up to an order of magnitude fewer physical cubits. This is a gamechanging technology and we're incredibly excited to scale it out. And finally, we put an incredible amount of resources into engineering our cryogenic platforms to to run for a long time, for years at a time in customer data centers with high uptime and high availability. All four of these technologies now are part of D-Wave as part of our combination and these are all critical to build and scale error corrected gate model systems. We believe D-Wave will deliver this first.

I just want to say a few words about this this advantage in uh error correction in encoding. Jail cubits offer a faster path to error correction. What I'm showing in the plot in the middle along the y- axis is is logical cubit error rate. You want to drive this as close to zero as possible. And on the x-axis is the physical cubits required to build a logical cubit. The number of physical cubits you're using to encode. As you add physical cubits, you actually drive down those error rates, but the goal is you'd want to minimize the number of physical cubits required. Dual rail technology allows us to do this with up to an order of magnitude fewer physical cubits and other approaches. We're also bringing and adapting our onchip cryogenic control that has enabled us to scale our kneeling architectures. We're adapting this to control the dual rail technology and this is fundamentally important. As this technology scales, we want to keep the number of control lines required to control the cubits relatively fixed. And our onchip control for our kneeling architectures allows us to reduce the cubit the control line counts for our cubid architectures by orders of magnitude. And we're working to adapt this for the dual rail technology. Allan said a few words about the acumen software stack. We're actually very excited about the software stack as well. We have a full product suite for operating and developing on dual rail systems. So if you're a developer writing a quantum program and you're used to for example programming in kiskuit, we have an API that allows you to run continue to develop in Kiskit and run on the dual dual rail platforms. But in addition there's APIs that allow us to make users to make unique advantage of the of the capabilities of dual rail cubits and really the the fundamental error gates and the error detection handling. So we have a comprehensive tool set for doing this development. This technology is like Rob said available to alpha users in the cloud. There's cloud orchestration that really offers a dual technology quantum computing as a service. In addition, there are some proprietary compilers that really allow you to take those quantum programs, compile them into machine executables or gate executables and then deploy them to either dual rail hardware or a very high performance simulator. As we work to integrate these technologies, as Alan said, we want to make these durail solvers and this technology integrated and available in our leap cloud platform. And we want to make the full tool set, the software development kit for doing the development available to all of our users in the ocean software development kit.

>> Thanks, Trevor.

Cheers

>> and Rob. Welcome to D-Wave.

Thank you. Exciting.

[applause]

So I briefly mentioned the gate model road map. I just wanted to say a little bit more about it. Um as I mentioned and as Rob mentioned there is today an 8 cubit dual rail system operational in New Haven. a complete software development kit, software suite for programming and utilizing that system, including the ability to develop algorithms that leverage the error awareness of the dual rail cubits. Later this year, we will have a 17 cubit version of that system available uh with a first demonstration of how error correction could work leveraging the dual whale cubits. We will also have these systems available in the leap quantum cloud service alongside our analing systems and with every new generation of gate model system. It will be an integrated part of the leap cloud environment. Uh we will also over the course of this year bring the acumen software stack into the leap cloud platform as well.

In 2027 we will have a 49 cubit version of the dual rail system and the initial build of 181 cubit version. And then in 2028 we will have the 181 cubit version generally available. This will be a very interesting system in that you could run it either as 181 cubits with error detection for developing uh new software tools new algorithms potentially identifying near-term use cases that could benefit from this technology. I mean think of just this as postnisk. This is the first generation of quantum computer that's beyond NISK. Not yet full error correction but beyond NISK or you can run this system configured as four logical cubits. By 2028 we will also have designed the 1,000 cubit version of this system which we expect will take a couple of years to build out. And then by then, call it 2030, we'll have designed the 5 to 10,000 cubit version with a couple of years to build out. And by the time we get there, we think that we will be converging in on a 100 logical cubits, error corrected cubits, which is the bar for commercial gate model quantum computing. And again, these will be superconducting systems, which means they run at superconducting speeds a thousand times faster than any of the other modalities. So why would you ever want one of the others? Who wants a slow quantum computer, but they will be fully error corrected and scaled efficiently because of the efficiency and how dual rail does error correction. So we actually think that despite the hype and the empty promises that you hear, D-Wave has the technology to be the first to market with a scaled error corrected gate model quantum computer and that will be while continuing to serve as the world's leading annealing quantum computing company.

So let me spend just a few minutes talking about our annealing systems. As I said, we also have a very strong roadmap for our annealing quantum computers with the target for advantage 3 being 100,000 cubits. There are a few things that are critical to achieving that goal. Advantage 3 will be our first multi-chip quantum computer. Up until now, we've scaled by putting more cubits on a chip. With advantage three, we will be interconnecting the processor chips to scale through multiple processor chips. Which is why we believe that we can get a 20fold increase in cubits in one product cycle. Remember our current advantage two process are 4500 cubits. So 20 to 25 processors interconnected gets us to 100,000. That's very doable for us. But we need some technologies to make it happen. We need to be able to interconnect the processor chips and preserve the superconducting and quantum properties between them. And we've been working with JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab, on the fabrication process to be able to do this bonding. We actually have it operational now. In fact, we've recently used it in a gate model demonstration of bonding a control chip to a cubit chip without loss of fidelity. But we have that process operational now to be used in our analing systems. We also need to make sure that with a 20fold increase in cubits, we don't have a 20fold increase in control lines. We control 4,500 cubits a day with a little over 200 control lines. When we go to 100,000, we can't grow to thousands of control lines. That's a brute force approach. It's not going to fly. Frankly, that's what many of the gate model companies are talking about. It isn't going to work. What we've done is worked on the architecture for our onchip cryogenic control to be able to control a 100,000 cubits with just 300 IO lines. This is related to the chart that Trevor showed you a few minutes ago. So building out the critical technologies for the 100,000 cubit annealing system and we're well down the path on that.

And these enealing systems are being used to support a broad array of commercial applications, but they're also now starting to be used for some very transformational applications. Two that I'll mention, and I've talked about them in the past, are AI and blockchain. Our enealing quantum computers are the first quantum computers that have been used commercially for large language model training. This was work done by uh Shinogi, previously the pharmaceutical division of Japan tobacco. They built a large language model classically trained for generating new molecular structures for human drugs. Then they redid the training leveraging our quantum computer. The graph that you see in the center is the results from that new model. You can see that on multiple dimensions, the molecular structures generated using the model trained with our quantum computer are better than what was obtained purely classically. Especially the middle graph, the lipopilicity. This is the ability of a compound to dissolve in fats, oils, and lipids. This is key to human drugs that work and these structures that are being generated are far more well suited to human drugs. And then in the blockchain and and by the way, that's just the beginning on AI. I mean, we're doing work in our labs today on how to leverage our quantum systems across a variety of different AI model training architectures starting to show very promising results. At the end of the day, we think this will deliver better models trained faster with significantly less electricity consumption. So, let's stop the craziness about all the nuclear power plants, right? I mean, we think that there's a better way to get there and that quantum will help us to get there.

Then there's blockchain. Um, I've talked about this in the past as well. All I will say is that we are working with a partner on a quantum hybrid blockchain that's going into testing this quarter. We'll see how it goes. It'll be a new token and if the testing goes well, you may at some time during the course of the year see an announcement about a new token launched leveraging D-Wave quantum computers.

And then there's our hybrid solvers. Our hybrid solvers are critical to the commercial application development work that we do with our customers. Our flagship solver is called the Stride Solver. We used to call it the nonlinear solver, but we decided we needed a better name. So, it's now called the Stride Hybrid Solver. This is a groundbreaking solver in the sense that it brings together multiple different technologies required for solving hard optimization problems. Obviously, we leverage our quantum computers. We leverage mixed in integer linear programming, tensor networks, lists, sets, other combinatorial variables. And the graph on the right is just one example of the kinds of results that we are getting with a stride solver. This is a satellite placement application. And what you want to do is you want to place the satellites to minimize the gap between the satellites. The gap is on the vertical axis. Lower is better. And then across the horizontal axis, number of satellites we're placing. And you can see in blue the stride solver at different run times, 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds. In orange, you see the classical solver that's typically used today for solving these types of problems run at the longest runtime, 60 seconds. The stride solver blows it away. And this is what we'd hope for and what we'd expect. But we've also just announced something I think revolutionary for this hybrid solver. The expressive power of this solver when you program it has grown dramatically since we first launched it to the point where now you can actually use ML models as a part of the optimization function and the constraints. So, you know, if you don't actually have the data, you can use models that generate it and incorporate that into the functions for the solver, which is quite revolutionary.

Okay, what I'd like to do now is show a quick demo. And so, I'd like for Alex Candello to join me on stage. Jalex is our vice president of algorithms, performance, and tools here at D-Wave. Alex,

[applause]

>> everyone,

>> for those of you that have been to Cubits previously, you'll know that it's quite common for Alex to join me on stage. Um, Alex is responsible for the team that has developed the stride solver. Uh, also does all our performance benchmarking, uh, develops new algorithms and applications, and Alex is going to walk us through a demo, uh, of some work that we did with North Wales Police.

>> That's right. Thanks, Alan. Hey, everyone. So, today I'm going to be showing you a demo of some work that we did as part of a proof of technology with the North Wales Police Department. The North Wales Police Department, as you might imagine, is responsible for policing in the north part of Wales. It's well named. Specifically though, the as time has gone on, the complexity of the challenges of determining where to deploy their assets and resources to provide geographic coverage while also responding to incidents has gotten to the point that they are considering technologies like quantum computing to accelerate their problem solving. So, this is going to be a demo of a project we did with them to experiment with that. What you see on the map here is one of the regions the North Wales Police are responsible for. They have several other regions in addition, and they've run these sorts of experiments on them, but for the demo today, we're going to be concerned with this one here. This region uh is split up into 20 different wards uh that all have incidents reported. They need to be covered. They need to be uh patrolled. On the map, you can see in color these little sort of house icons. Each of those house icons corresponds to a station. And each of these stations has a set of assets available to it. So for instance, station 8 in purple up there in sort of the top right has two four day staff, six night staff, and two vehicles available to it. Whereas station 11 in red actually has no day staff, no night staff, and no vehicles.

So, Alex, I hate to say this, but four stations, you know, four day staff, four nights after, that doesn't sound like a large complicated problem.

Totally. Okay. So, what makes this problem challenging? There's actually three different challenges that I'm going to talk about over the course of this demo. But the first one that I want to address is the size of the solution space that we need to explore with the solver. Each station has a different number of staff vehicles day and night. So there's a combinatorial explosion there. Each staff can be assigned to a different number of vehicles for a different length of shift. These vehicles can be placed in many different locations on the map. There's a different set of incidents which I'll get to in a moment that they have to respond to. All of this creates a combinatorial explosion in this in the solution space which is exactly the type of problem that our solver excels on is a large rugged discrete combinatorally large uh solution space which is why we try to solve this.

So as I alluded to just a moment ago uh beyond just the stations and providing a large degree of geographic coverage we're also there's also a set of incidents that we need to respond to. So each of these little black markers with the little target on it corresponds to an actual incident that occurred uh March 5th. I always get the date wrong in 2015. So we are working with real data here albeit historical data. So our challenge is to allocate these assets to provide a high degree of coverage over this while also responding to these incidents in a small amount of time. So I'm actually going to go ahead and kick off a run of the solver. And while that's running, I'm going to tell you about the second major challenge that makes this problem ch diff difficult. And that is in the constrained part of it. So the first part was the size of the solution space. The second part is the constraints. Each of these vehicles, each of these staff rather in a vehicle can spend a maximum of 4 hours in the field. Each response, each target needs to be responded to within 20 minutes of that response. There's a total length of shift that is allowed for each of these uh folks and all of these constraints together create a very challenging problem for the solver.

So as always this demo was done live. So while I was talking uh we actually uh ran live on our stride solver as Alan alluded to and here is a schedule that was determined by our solver. So you can see that at midnight uh on the schedule that we devised, three of the vehicles were home at their stations. That's why they're colorcoded and currently sort of faded a little bit. Whereas one of the vehicles was out on patrol. If we sort of click through the day, and we'll see how good I am at finding specific times. At 10:00 a.m., you can actually see that all four vehicles were out on patrol, and one of the vehicles, this one down here in the bottom right, was responding to an incident. further. If we go to let's see if I can find 2 p.m. because normally that's pretty reliable for having uh a challenging bit here at 2 p.m. you actually see an example of one more thing and this is really the thing that truly makes this problem challenging and truly requires our nonlinear solver. You will notice that one of our cars

>> our what solver

>> sorry our stride hybrid solver which happens to be a nonlinear solver. Thank you Alan.

[snorts]

Um, you can see that one of our vehicles is responding to two different incidents. Doesn't seem like such a big deal, right? Well, actually, if you try to model this problem, you're going to run into a challenge, which is that remember, we're trying to minimize our incident response time. So, in the right in the best case scenario, this top line, you have a car, maybe it's left the station or it's finished its last incident response. It's sitting idle. A call comes in to respond to an incident. It immediately drives, arrives at the incident, is able to respond. This response time is just the drive time in that case. Easy peasy, no problem. But there is another case and it's more challenging, which is that you are not currently available to respond. You respond, you're currently working on another incident, but the clock doesn't stop just waiting for you. The clock has to start when the call came in. So the total time of response is the time till completion plus the drive time. So this doesn't seem so complicated, but in order to model this, you need a max function. It's just the max of these two times. No problem. Except that I need to tell you that all of our classical competitors don't encode a max function. This is a nonlinear function, which is a capability that our solver can do, which is why we're able to solve this problem.

So finally, I want to leave you with the overall results as reported by uh North Wales Police. So for the schedules that we were generating for them, we were able to generate them faster. We were able to slightly improve the incident meeting goal which is great. But crucially, we were able to reduce the response time by almost 50%. 6 minutes might not seem like a lot, but in the context of a police response, say that there's a domestic violent instance or something like that, 6 minutes is an absolute eternity. And so driving this number down was absolutely crucial for them.

>> So with that, I'm going to turn it back to Alex. Thanks, everyone.

>> [applause]

>> And of course, saving lives is what it's all about. And we're really proud to have been a part of this effort. Okay. So um a recent study 2025 by Wakefield resarch indicated that 81% of executives feel like they've basically hit the limit with respect to what classical computing can do to solve their hard optimization problems. And by the way, business optimization problems represent most of the important problems that businesses need to solve. But with D-Wave's analing technology today, gate model in the future, and with our stride solver and our amazing services team that helps our customers to build and deploy applications, we're making enormous progress across the board in helping businesses leverage this technology to benefit their operations. We're now working with one of the world's largest US international airline carriers on problems that you might imagine, things like crew scheduling or plane routing. We're working with one of the world's largest chemical companies, BASF, on optimizing how they operate on their plant floor to fulfill orders, reducing the time to optimize the scheduling from 10 hours down to just seconds. We're working with one of the world's leading mobile carriers, NTD Dokamo. We've talked about this in the past to basically optimize cell tower resources and increase the number of phones that can be supported per tower. And we're working with one of the world's largest payment companies on a variety of applications, including customer loyalty reward program optimization.

So, what I'd like to do now is spend a little time talking to some of our customers. and hearing what they have to say about D-Wave, uh, our products and our technologies. Um, what I'd like to do is start with Troy Craig, who's the VP of software engineering in the Optum Growth Office. Troy, if you could join me,

[applause]

>> welcome to Cubits.

>> Thank you. Excited to be here. So, uh, I know it's hard to believe, but some people might not know who OPTIM is or, you know, how it relates to United Health Group. So, maybe you could just start there.

>> Sure. Optum is a healthcare services and technology organization that sits with inside of our parent company, United Health Group, with a focus on uh providing health care services and technology to improve the overall experience. And obviously healthcare deals with large complex problems and you know I think that you know you believe that classical is starting to struggle to keep up. So maybe you could talk about you know why quantum.

>> Yeah healthcare is full of a lot of large timebased and data heavy problems where we're hitting current limitations based on the traditional models that are available today. We believe quantum could be an unlock to attack these problems differently and see some advancements in across the overall healthare system.

>> So you know we spent some time working with your team. How did it go?

>> Yeah, Optum is constantly evaluating emerging technologies and partners and uh in that we see D-Wave as a strong partner in the quantum space and um it's something we're really excited about.

>> And where do we go from here?

>> Yeah, continuing to identify the right problems to attack with quantum is where I see our teams coming together and really focusing our time and energy on those big ones where quantum is the right fit.

>> And um you think we'll get to production deployment?

>> Very very excited and optimistic.

>> All right. Thanks.

Right.

>> Thanks so much, Alan.

[applause]

Um, we've had the opportunity to speak with uh Dale Moore from Davidson Technologies in the past. Uh, I'm going to ask him to join me uh on stage again in just a minute. Um, but Dale Moore is the president and CEO of Davidson Technologies. Uh and we also have here actually through uh Zoom Matthew Steman who's president and chief business officer at Anderl Industries. And so let me ask Dale to join me on stage and um then we'll see if we can get Matthew up on the uh screen. And there he is.

>> Hello.

>> Hey Matthew. Hey Dale.

>> Hey Alan. How you doing?

>> Good to see you.

>> [applause]

>> So, first of all, let me say that Davidson is celebrating their 30th anniversary, Dale. That's an amazing achievement, and I just wanted to congratulate you on that.

>> Thank you. We're excited. It's a big year for us

>> and uh we're looking forward to helping you make it even better years going forward. So, so Dale, um you know, there's been a collaboration between Davidson, Anderl, and D-Wave. Maybe you can start by talking a little bit about that and what makes it so unique.

>> Yeah. So I think you know this is my fourth cubits Allen and you know uh we've been up here before talking about different aspects of how we want to apply quantum technology to the use cases that our customers care about. Our mission is very simple. Innovate with purpose, deliver with speed, and empower the war fighter. When you take that vision and that mission and combine it with the operational excellence of what Anderal is providing to their customers today, it really brings a different level uh to the applications that we're trying to develop. And so this collaboration from my perspective is really really important and unique to the national security space. And again, in the world that we live in, the problem sets are only getting more complex. And when you underpin all of the different solutions that are already out there uh for doing different things in our space with the ability and the capability of a quantum based approach particularly in the optimization of decision support mechanisms, it really drives what we believe is going to be a foundational technology for the future of the national security environment. And I couldn't ask for a better partner uh than Anderil and and D-Wave for that matter. And bringing the best of these three companies together and what we do well um I think is going to prove out to be a a gamechanging event.

>> Yeah, very exciting. Thanks, Dale. And Matt, um you know, we've had the chance to hear from Dale in the past, so I think most of the people here know a bit about Davidson. uh maybe you could just spend a minute talking about Android, but then you know maybe tell us what's the most surprising thing you've learned from the initial collaboration.

>> Sure. Um well, first apologies for not being able to make it there. Um I'm hoping that one day Quantum can solve the intractable uh DC snowplow optimization problem.

[laughter]

Um we're a bit uh iced over here, but thank you for having me. Um yeah, first uh uh Andre, we're about eight years old, 7,000 people. Uh we build mainly, uh advanced robotics and the software systems that power those robotics for, uh the national security community. Um you know, I think when we started the company, uh I wouldn't have said that quantum would have been on our bingo card. Um that was eight years ago. You know, five years ago, probably not. um about two years ago um I think the technology matured to the point where we started to believe uh there was a national security application today and so for us we're not um we're not an S&T company uh we're an integrator and so we we generally focus on higher maturity uh technologies so uh in our space we call that technology readiness level uh so think TRL like 56 how do we get that to a nine into into fold fielding. You know, maybe two years ago, we kicked off a campaign to really start to understand uh quantum optimization, its impact of what we do. I I have been shocked at how uh fast and mature the technology has been to deliver actual useful results uh to the problem sets that we're working on. I'm not going to spoil what those are. one of my colleagues will speak later today in depth about uh some of the problems. Um uh the topic area is is broadly missile defense uh and sort of the optimization um in terms of sensing and and affecting within that domain. Um you know, but but for me I'm I'm I'm not a a quantum expert, a computer scientist by background, engineer by background. Um my my biggest shock has been this stuff is ready. It's ready to use today and we're going to continue to to use it with uh our partners uh and with the national security community to its greatest effect possible.

>> And Matt, what has been the response to quantum from the defense industry?

I would say it's probably similar to our own um where it's sort of moved uh I think again over the last 24 months or so from this like kind of realm of I don't believe it science fiction to okay it's it's here it's now um you know many in the audience probably know the government has mandated a shift uh to postquantum uh crypto by 2030 so so the government clearly believes that we're moving from S&T into R&D into full fielding and up the value chain uh uh in the government's terms in four years. Um and so I think broadly within the community that I work in um we all now have to be prepared to integrate these types of technologies into everything that we do.

>> Yeah. So Matt and Department of War, welcome to D-Wave. Um Dale uh why should the US government prioritize quantum computing investment?

>> Well Allan I think it's it's clear um and I mentioned this earlier you know the threats that we deal with uh on a on a daily basis and the scenarios of by which these use cases and problem sets that are national security problems are only getting more and more complex. Um and so this technology to Matthew's point is here today. it is operationally viable. We are at the forefront of applying the technology to problem sets that are that those customers care about. And so it's about real mission impact and that's what we're focused on. And I think from the US government's perspective, they're going to have to mature quantum technology and its application in multi-dommain space um in order to achieve the results that they're looking for and fundamentally stay ahead of some of the near-per adversaries in the world today. And the geopolitical environment is only getting more complex. uh obviously you know the proliferation of ballistic missile technology and missile technology as a whole around the world is a critical uh security risk for the for the US government and so our focus again of staying ahead of the mission and really delivering value uh to to those customer problems is is our focus and I think quantum is going to be a part of it and we're excited to leverage our collaborative um partnership and fundamentally the platform that's hosted in our facility uh to help support

And and Matt, just to finish up, where do you see the collaboration going from here in terms of use cases to explore?

>> Sure. Well, first let me say that none of this works unless uh all three of our companies bring to bear the right types of subject matter expertise in hardware, in software, algorithm development, domain expertise, the integration of those solutions uh within the broader national security apparatus. All of this is really complicated. Um we shouldn't make light of the subjugary either. Um this is uh in in most cases life and death. Um this sort of changes the balance of um US and Western deterrence. Stuff that matters. May maybe people don't uh uh that that folks that don't work in the national security community, they don't think about it every day. Um those that do, this is this is our lives. This is what we do. Um the partnership is just going to grow from here. There are there are an infinite number of optimization problems within the national security community. Um missile defense is where we started because we knew that we had a customer that uh was keen to understand uh quantum's uh ability to help in that domain. Um what's next? Network optimization. uh other types of pairing problems, other types of logistics challenges and contested logistics uh within uh broad areas of operation. Um we we couldn't be more excited about where we are. The the fact that we're first past the post uh on a lot of this stuff with our customers is exciting. It's new uh and we're we're ready to get after it.

>> Great, Matt. Thanks, Dale. Thank you.

>> Thank you, Alan. And by the way, Dale, it's great that we have the Advantage 2 system now operational at your headquarters in Huntsville and, you know, starting to work on how we secure that thing to be able to run classified applications.

>> Excited about the future, Alan. Thank you.

>> Thank you. Thanks, Matt.

[applause]

Okay, so that was a little bit on um applications and use cases leveraging our quantum systems. Um that work generally goes on through our leap quantum cloud service where our customers access the systems on an as needed basis to run their applications. But we're also seeing increasing interest in having on premises D-Wave systems. Um the first system that we sold for on premise installation was sold to the ULIC supercomputing center in Germany. Um and we've announced uh you know another recently which we'll talk about in a minute and a third just this morning which we'll talk about in a minute. So, uh, what I'd like to do right now is I want to welcome a very special guest on stage. Um, in October this past year, 2025, I had the opportunity to participate in the Italy's digital innovation forum in Ko Lombardi. That's actually the hometown of

Our next guest. Uh, and at the Digital Innovation Forum, the Q Alliance was born. This is an alliance to bring quantum computing to Italy in support of its digital transformation initiative, workforce development, application development, um, you know, leveraging quantum systems.

So, I'd like you to join me in welcoming from the government of the Italian Republic, Senator Allesio Booty, Under Secretary of State to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers with responsibility for innovation and digital transformation.

Senator Booty, [applause] >> welcome.

>> Thank you. It's a great pleasure to have you here with us.

>> I'm honored to be here with you and your friends.

>> Thank you. So, um I have a few questions that I'd like to ask you and um uh I'm going to go ahead and ask all the questions and then give you an opportunity to respond.

>> Yeah. Uh if you want uh to ask me something, we can uh we can start.

>> Oh, I want to ask you a lot.

>> I I heard before. So,

>> okay. Okay. [laughter] Well, why don't we go ahead and get started? Um, okay.

So, the questions are: First, why do you see quantum computing as strategic for the Republic of Italy? Second, how does the Q Alliance initiative fit within Italy's national quantum strategy and what role do you see for open public private collaboration? How will this vision translate into concrete actions? And what are the next steps you foresee particularly in terms of research centers and national infrastructure? And then you mentioned economic impact. How do you see quantum already delivering value to industry and public administration today? And then finally, what's the importance of international collaboration in quantum computing, especially in the global ecosystem such as the one represented here at Cubits? We have two days to answer all these questions.

>> No,

>> no. Five minutes, 10 minutes.

>> You can take as much time as you want so long as it kind of fits within a reasonable time frame.

>> I am prepared enough and I thank you. Thank you. Can I use uh

>> uh Yeah, sure. In fact, would you like me to close this?

>> No.

>> Okay. It's better.

>> I I I thought we had a good relationship. [snorts] [laughter] Thank you, Alan. Thank you for uh your introduction and questions, but uh define our moment. I'm honored to be here with uh with you. I speak uh on behalf of uh my government as you know and I took some notes and I have prepared uh some answers. We have a little time for your challenging questions. Uh but I will do my my best even with my jet lag. So please bear with me because I comes from Rome.

First of quantum technology represent a structural shift not a gradual evolution by a fact how we compute secure information and make decision in critical domains for Italy with its strong scientific base and diversified industry. Quantum is not optional. It is strategic. This is why we have created a national quantum strategy as you know. But strategy alone is not enough. What matters most is coordination. Coordination between research, industry, public administration and international partner so that scientific excellence translates into real world application, economic impact and lasting competitiveness.

This leads me naturally to Q alliance and we strongly support the Q alliance because we believe in open, transparent and collaborative models. It is not a closed club nor a top-down structure. Access to real quantum systems such as those from the wave is essential. Q alliance already connects major academic institutions from Italy from Calabria in Coza to Federico II University in Naples and in Subria University. This worked approach is essential as no single actor can drive this transformation alone. I'm pleased to see the wave among the founders as real quantum system are crucial. Quantum must be used not just studied. Our goal is to move from small fragmented efforts to real scale. Projects like the VA National Research Center and collaboration with the universities are step in that direction. I want to clarify building a center in the Komao area is not just for the local region. It will be a national resource open to everyone and connected internationally. This center will provide access to quantum systems, support algorithm development, train the workforce and terrestrial industrial applications. The key ideas are openness, shared infrastructure and economic impact.

Quantum is often seen is as a future promise, but it already has value today, especially in hybrid approaches when combined with with classical computing. Italian industry and public institutions can benefit in finance, logistics, energy, healthcare, manufacturing. At the same time, we must train people to use quantum technology effectively. This is fundamental. Building a strong ecosystem means developing technology, skills, applications and governance together.

Finally, quantum by nature is global. International collaboration is essential especially in our current complicated geopolitical situation. No country can build a full ecosystem alone. Italy wants an open and transparent ecosystem strong in Europe and open to international partners. I believe in this project and I'm here also for this standard security and responsible use require working together across borders. We aim to be a reliable partner and we will do our part. We want to share knowledge, host infrastructure and enables experiments. And we want to collaborate with allies who share our vision of innovation, responsibility and long-term values. Q Alliance and events like Cubits 26 show that this approach works. By the way, I look forward to welcoming you in Chernobio Como for the fourth edition of the digital innovation forum KOMO Lake 2026 which will take place in October. On that occasion, we will be able to present the work we have accomplished together through our Q Alliance partnership. Are we up to the challenge? I think so. Quantum is more than a technology. It is a political and strategic journey and Italy is fully committed to this journey. I hope to have answered all your questions. I would like to add that Italy is one of the first European countries to approve a national quantum strategy. I will be talking more about that in my official speech later today and uh as you know my staff who I would like to thank is working closely with the wave on our alliance. Thank you so much. [applause]

Thank you. Thank you. So thank you Senator Booty. And one of the first things that the Q Alliance did was to purchase 50% capacity of a D-Way system to be installed in the Koma Lombardi region. And we're very excited to have the opportunity to work with you.

>> It will be a success.

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you. Thank you. [applause]

Okay, speaking of on premise systems, um earlier today we announced that Florida Atlantic University has purchased a D-Wave Advantage 2 quantum computer for $20 million to be installed at their Boca Raton campus here in Boca Raton. And we are really excited about the opportunity to help bring Quantum to Florida, help build the workforce, help explore use cases, help with new educational programs. We also announced that D-Wave uh a US company since we went public about three years ago is moving its corporate headquarters from PaloAlto, California to here in Boca Raton, Florida and creating a new US R&D center right here. To help me talk a little bit about this, uh, I'm going to ask Secretary Alex Kelly, who's the Secretary of the Florida Department of Commerce. Prior to his appointment, he served as the deputy chief of staff at the executive officer of the governor. And Adam Hner, president of Florida Atlantic University, a lifelong public servant and advocate for education, economic development, and innovation with more than 30 years of executive leadership experience. He was appointed as Florida Atlantic University's eighth president by unanimous unanimous vote of the board of trustees in February 2025 and took office on March 10th.

Secretary Kelly and President Hner, [applause] >> congratulations. Good to see you. Good to see you. Welcome.

>> This is for you. Uh

>> oh. [laughter]

>> That's great.

>> [applause]

>> Thank you.

So, uh, people who have been attending Cubits for a while know that um I'm not opposed to actually changing my clothes on [laughter] stage, but since it wasn't planned, I think I'll uh resist the temptation. Um, okay.

So, uh, Secretary Kelly, um, you've taken a leading role in investing in emerging technology coming into Florida, uh, and we're excited to be establishing our new R&D center and corporate headquarters right here in Boca Raton. How are you envisioning D-Wave helping to address problems facing the state?

>> Sure. Well, Alan, first off, let me just say congratulations. Welcome to Florida. Uh, we're grateful to have you here. Uh, I know Palm Beach County, the whole community will be grateful to have you here. Um, you know, I think for us when when we started this dialogue, uh, you know, last year and, uh, we talked to Quantum Beach and we really working with the Palm Beach Business Development Board, working with Ford Atlantic University, we were incredibly excited because Florida, if you think about what we're good at, if you think about the industries that are prevalent here, the science, the R&D that's prevalent here, we're huge in military and defense. 21 military installations in Florida. We have 16 seapp ports, 21 commercial service airports, three space ports. We are probably one of the world's most unique, maybe the most unique transportation and logistics hub in the world. Uh we're huge in life sciences. We're one of the largest states in the country, one of the largest places in the world for uh R&D and manufacturing medicine, for medical device technology. Uh, and here where we're standing, this is one of the most amazing places in the world for financial services, fintech, cyber security. Everything I just said, D-Wave is great at and you're pioneering at. And so we really see this as an incredible fit, an incredible opportunity. And and I think it's worth accentuating and and it was said before, but the national security, cyber security, data privacy, protection of our financial systems that's involved in all of that. Um it it this is the best place in the world right here in Palm Beach County to really become the hub. We're looking forward to partnering with you and you have an incredible partner you've just picked uh in President Hazner in Florida Atlantic.

>> And President Hazner, as part of the announcement today, we'll be installing a D-Wave quantum computer at your campus just down the road. So what does it mean to you to have a quantum computer uh on your campus and here in Florida? Let let me just follow up too to what Alex said, which is uh welcome to Boca Raton, the birthplace of the personal computer. Welcome to Quantum Beach, and welcome to Florida Atlantic, your new hometown university. And thanks to this partnership, uh Florida's quantum university.

>> Listen, can I get a job if Dwave ever fires me?

>> But we're we're really excited. You asked, what does it mean? We're really excited as a R1 university. uh this acquisition and this partnership is going to put us uh in an elite space of higher education uh here in the country. And I think uh having you uh and this partnership uh having your your system on campus and this partnership I think is really going to differentiate Florida Atlantic University. Um and we collaborate a lot with all the other state universities. But what this is going to mean for our faculty, for our students, for workforce initiatives, uh it's really going to help to uh expand on the existing areas of research that we're currently uh strong at, whether it's uh computational neuroscience, uh other use applications, uh as well as open up new opportunities like the secretary talked about here regionally in finance as well as uh throughout the state and and beyond. So, uh, this is a, uh, big inflection moment for a very young university. And so, we're excited to welcome D-Wave to the community and and we're really excited about what this partnership means for the future of our university and our faculty and our students. So, thank you.

>> And, and we're very excited as well. We're excited to work with you as the lead university here in Florida and, you know, helping to bring uh, all the other academic institutions into the fold as we try to leverage quantum throughout the state. Um, at the end of last year, Florida announced the creation of the Florida Alliance for Quantum Technologies. Um, it's anou with many Florida universities to engage with quantum technologies and D-Wave is excited to have our system at FAU to support this effort. And so, President Hassner, maybe you can tell us how this announcement today is going to help accelerate the work that that uh coalition is going to be doing.

>> Yeah, I I referenced the fact that 12 state universities in in Florida uh all specialize in in many different areas and that uh alliance um thatou throughout the state university system really helped to set the framework for the future of quantum in Florida and higher education is going to be such an important part of that. We have uh a great framework uh already at Florida Atlantic University. And so partnering with the other state universities, the other higher education institutions uh will only help to expand on what Florida Atlantic's doing with D-Wave. And I think it's going to be even more important for the use applications regionally and throughout the state and also continue to make Boca Raton, Palm Beach County, uh, and the state of Florida a real destination for these types of industries and these types of businesses that want to partner with us and want to partner with D-Wave.

So, while Secretary Kelly and President Hner have been key advocates for this effort, I also want to thank uh a few other people in Florida who have helped make this momentous uh announcement possible. Uh first of all, Kelly Smallidge uh from the Palm Beach Business Development Board. I must say [applause] when you plan to come to Palm Beach, I didn't say if, I said when, you have to talk to Kelly because she is an amazing advocate and will help you cut through the red tape and get done whatever you need to get done. I'd also like to thank Mayor Singer, uh, the Boca Raton mayor for his support of our move here to, uh, Boca Raton. Uh, I'd like to thank Matt Simiglia, uh, who is a founder of Quantum Coast Capital, who has also been instrumental in helping to bring Quantum to Palm Beach County and to Florida. And of course, there are many other business leaders and local leaders who are in the audience today that have been helpful and we thank you all.

>> Thank you. Good to see you. Welcome. Thank you.

>> Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for being here. [applause]

Okay. Um, we're going to switch gears a little bit and put me on the hot spot now. Um, I'm going to ask Alan Kentwitz, who's the host of Big Technology Podcast and has interviewed tech's biggest names, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Alman, Larry Ellison, recently me, uh, and he's also an on air contributor to CNBC. So, please join me in welcoming Alex to the stage.

Hey, Alex.

>> Hey, Dr. Barretts.

>> Good to see you.

>> Good to see you.

>> Should we do the fire?

>> Yeah, we're gonna sit down and uh have a little bit of a chat here.

>> Great.

>> So, uh this is an opportunity for Alex to ask me some questions that he thinks you all might be interested in and uh hopefully you will be.

>> Great. Well, we have a great crowd uh here today and I know that we're live streaming this and we're going to put it on YouTube. So, I want everybody at home to be able to hear how many people we have with us. So, you got to make some noise. Let's hear you. [applause] [cheering]

I'm Alex Canittz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast. I'm thrilled to be here with Dr. Dr. Alan Barretts for a conversation about the cutting edge of quantum computing. Dr. Barretts, it's great to speak with you again.

>> Great to speak with you. You're making this sound so professional.

>> Got to get people into it. This is this is the way we enter.

>> Okay.

>> Lot of news today.

>> Yeah.

>> A lot of news. Can you give us the highlights >> and what the implications are?

>> Yeah. So uh first of all uh not brand new news but uh within the last couple of weeks we did announce that we uh have acquired quantum circuits uh which brings revolutionary new gate model technology to D-Wave and we believe uh accelerates us to the forefront of gate model computing alongside the fact that we're already the world leaders in analing quantum computer. So making us the leading quantum computing company. Um, we've also announced, as you just heard, that uh Florida Atlantic University has purchased a D-Wave Advantage system to be placed uh at their Boca Raton campus just uh a little bit down the road uh for use in uh you know, workforce development, uh application development, new science, leveraging quantum computing here in Florida. Uh we uh anna we What time is it?

>> Come on, give me the news.

>> We we We we just announced that we have signed a new uh quantum compute as a service deal. It's a uh two-year $10 million deal uh to work with a Fortune 100 company to basically build and deploy uh a collection of different uh quantum applications uh within their environment. This is the first large enterprise deal I believe uh ever for quantum computing certainly for D-Wave. Uh and it's something that I have been talking about for a while that we were on the path to achieve uh this transition from you know small proofs of concept to large enterprise deals. Uh and then of course we just announced that um you know we are moving our corporate headquarters from Palo Alto, California to right here in Palm Beach County. and uh we're really excited to be here.

>> Now, one bit of news that caught my attention is that you're announcing a partnership with Andre, the defense technology company. Um all these different scenarios ran through my head of what that could be. Is it trying to find new types of weapons? Is it logistics? Is it simulations? What is that partnership going to?

>> So it it's trying to help the US government and the department of war solve their complex computational problems in support of national defense. So um you know up until now the US government has been mostly focused on long-term research around quantum but our annealing quantum computers are able to solve hard problems today including hard national defense problems. So this is about working to really help address some of those hard problems leveraging quantum systems right now today. And I think you know uh you heard from Dale and from Matthew that um you know they were surprised at how capable our systems were how much they are able to do right now today in addressing some of these challenging problems.

>> Now this is a moment where a lot of us are hearing even those of us outside of the quantum industry are hearing much more about quantum. seems like every couple months there's a new announcement of a breakthrough or an application that seemed long away but is now possible. So talk a little bit about why quantum, why now and why we're seeing this urgency around this technology at this moment.

>> Yeah. Um, so first of all I do think that we are at the point where there are hard problems that classical is not able to solve well enough. Um and these problems cut across a variety of different application areas. And in fact, uh you know, you saw one of the comments from Wakefield Research that 81% of executives think that classical is out of steam for solving the problems that are important to them. So there's an awareness of the fact that um something needs to change in the compute environment to be able to solve these hard problems better and faster than they're being solved today. um and quantum computing is the answer to that problem. I think the thing that has been less well understood certainly not well recognized is that quantum can address these problems right now today not three years not 5 years not 10 years in the future but right now today that's what our annealing quantum computers are capable of doing so as word is now getting out that quantum can solve your hard problems today we're starting to see an acceleration in interest in actually leveraging that technology

>> and give us some examples of what quantum computing can do that a classical computer could not.

>> Yeah. So one of them well we need to divide the use cases into two different categories. Um I call them evolutionary use cases and revolutionary use cases. So you said what classical computers can't do to me those are more revolutionary applications. There are applications where classical computers are solving the problems today. it's just they're not solving them fast enough or they're not solving them optimally and so there's more business benefit operational efficiency to be gained with better solutions. So our annealing quantum computers currently are primarily focused on those evolutionary applications whether it's you in the area of workforce scheduling which is like what Alex Candello showed us or in the area of manufacturing optimization or protein folding. These are problems that are actually being solved today classically just not well enough or fast enough and our quantum computers can improve. Um then there are applications that are beyond the reach of classical full app. You can't even get near optimal solutions. You can't even get close. We demonstrated an example of that uh early last year when we showed that we could simulate properties of magnetic materials to aid in new uh materials design that could be done on our quantum computer in 20 minutes. But it would take nearly a million years on the fastest supercomputers in the world to perform those computations. So those are problems that you know can't even be addressed today. And there are others that fall into that category as well. Some of the things I talked about before like global modeling, global designer drugs and so on.

>> Okay, let's go a level deeper on something you said which is uh that this type of computing can be used for improved workforce scheduling. I think a critic might say, look, you can do pretty good workforce scheduling with classical computers today. Why do you need quantum to do this? So talk a little bit about what exactly quantum gets you that you would not get with a classical computer.

>> Yeah, I mean let's just go back to the demo that Alex Candela showed, right? I mean th this is a problem of forward placement of uh emergency services personnel and vehicles. Now you might think that's a simple problem, right? small number of um you know service stations, small number of vehicles, small number of officers, but there's so many possible places they could be placed. There are interdependencies between uh the placements and uh you know servicing crimes or domestic disputes that it's a really hard problem. Leveraging our quantum computers response time was cut in half and that really does save lives. So this is a big important deal.

All right, let's get into the technology. I mean, you've spoken before about the benefits of superconducting quantum computing, and I'd love to hear your perspective on the trade-offs between that and other approaches and where D-Wave strategy fits.

>> Yeah. So, uh, this is a big debate in the quantum industry. What's going to win? Is it superconducting from companies like D-Wave or IBM or Google or Regetti? Or is it trapped ion from companies like INQ or Quintontinuum? Or is it neutral atom from QA or Pascal or Photonix from Saquantum or Xanadu? It's a huge debate that's going on right now. And the way the debate kind of unfolds, the superconducting proponents say, well, superconducting is a thousand times faster. It's just physics. And why would you ever want a quantum computer that's a thousand times slower? So of course superconducting is going to win. But then the trapped ion or the neutral atom proponents will say yes but our cubits are natural cubits, atoms, ions, photons. They have much higher fidelity. So it's going to be much easier to error correct. We'll be able to get to error corrected gate model quantum computers much faster than superconducting. Maybe superconducting will never even get there. So that's kind of the way the debate plays out. But with the acquisition of quantum circuits, we just totally put that debate to bed because this dual rail technology that quantum circuits has developed is absolutely revolutionary. It is transformational. We are talking about superconducting cubits. So it's the speed of superconducting thousand times faster than the other modalities. But it has the fidelity of trapped ions or neutral atoms. Very high quality cubits making it much easier to error correct, much more efficient to error correct. So now you know in some sense we've got the best of both worlds. Frankly, I don't know how the other modalities compete at this point because they don't have the speed that our cubits have. I also don't know how the other superconducting companies compete because they don't have the fidelity. error correction is going to be much harder for them. This really does put D-Wave in a transformational leadership position.

>> You had the road map earlier up about how um the dual world technology will continue to grow >> um and eventually link together a bunch of cubits. So talk a little bit about what that enables at each stage because I found that very interesting.

>> Yeah. So um first of all our annealing quantum computers are commercial today 4500 cubits solving real world business problems demonstrating quantum supremacy on useful problems. Gate model quantum computers are not yet commercial. Nobody today has commercial gate model quantum computers. They are just not fast enough, large enough, quiet enough. By quiet enough I mean error-free. Okay. And it's going to take time to get there. Um, we must error correct to get them to be quiet enough. We got to get rid of those errors. Uh, and we have to be able to scale them. So, most people believe and I believe that we need about 100 error corrected cubits to start doing useful work. Okay. Well, in order to error correct, we need multiple physical cubits per error-corrected cubit. And that varies um you know depending on you know the technology and who you talk to. It could be anywhere from 20 cubits to 2,000 cubits physical cubits per logical error corrected cubit. Well, we're not there yet. Nobody is there yet. We do not have error corrected logical cubits. You'll hear people say, "Oh, we have logical cubits. We have this many logical cubits." I want to be kind. That is a very misleading statement. Uh these are not fully error- corrected cubits. They are small error correction. The number of compute um uh terms that they can process is still very small, nowhere near large enough to be able to solve useful realworld problems. We need full error correction. So until we get there, gate model systems are going to be in a uh research and experimentation mode. The same true with our gate model systems. DR8, DR17, DR49, DR181, even DR1000. These will be research systems that can be used to explore the development of new tools for writing applications. Uh potentially new algorithms with the dual rail cubits. Having an awareness of errors is revolutionary and kind of writing new algorithms or new applications that leverage that capability will be I think an important new fertile ground for research and experimentation. Not until we get to the hundred logical cubits will these systems actually become commercial. So we still have a few years to go before we

>> Okay,

>> I said a few.

>> What does a few mean?

>> A few means more than two. Okay. [laughter]

Um, so meanwhile there is a lot of momentum, uh, big acquisition like you mentioned, lots of product announcements. Just talk a little bit about your recent news in the context of where D-Wave is heading and your overall strategy.

>> Yeah. Um, so as I mentioned previously, we have a dual platform strategy. Uh we are the only company in the world that is significantly invested in both analing and gate model quantum computing able to address the full set of customer use cases and we have a strong roadmap for uh continuing to bring ever more powerful analing systems to market to solve larger and more complex commercial problems as well as to get to that scaled error corrected gate model quantum computer. But this also means that unlike any other quantum computing company which is entirely in the R&D and research experimentation mode, we have commercial systems. So we're also focused on building the business. This is about, you know, growing system sales. We announced another one today. This is about growing application development and application deployment work. you know, we talked to two companies today that we're working with on that. So, it's about building the commercial business alongside of the R&D work and, you know, kind of driving to longer term commercial value with gate model systems. So, that dual platform strategy is very important and very valuable.

>> You made a big statement earlier, well, a number of them, but one uh in particular. you were talking about how quantum and AI can be used together and you said maybe all these nuclear power plants don't need to go online or I'm you know paraphrasing but something along that line. Um is that is that really the case? Because if you think about the amount of money that's being invested in powering up and the electricity and the compute uh that's going into training these systems and you mentioned uh your technology has already been used to train a large language model. Is it is this really a technology that can um support artificial intelligence training?

>> So uh yes at the right time. Okay. So I I understand that we have a massive power problem today and I understand that um kind of business as usual solving that problem is going to be very challenging and you know we're going to have to see massive power generation stations coming online in order to address the needs but that's assuming current course in speed that doesn't take into account potential revolutionary new technologies that can help to address this problem. I do believe quantum is that technology. The early evidence from our work with Shanogi indicates that there is an ability for quantum to deliver better faster trained models uh and aid in reducing power consumption. Uh but that's just a first demonstration. Uh in our labs today we are seeing the ability to drain a variety of different models leveraging our quantum systems again showing great efficiencies uh and the potential to reduce power consumption. So I do think this will be a big part of the solution to the energy problem. It's a question of when. Uh, you know, will it be this year? Will it be next year? Will it be the following year? I I don't think we're talking about the following year. I think we will start to see this benefit emerge this year or early next year.

>> Somebody better call the AI labs.

>> Yeah. I I think at one point I said time to short the energy stocks.

>> Okay.

>> Maybe I shouldn't say [laughter] that. I don't know.

>> It's your words.

Um, so there's so much attention to quantum like we talked about earlier and there's a lot of hype. There's a lot of stuff that you know maybe we we talked about earlier people are putting out there not so credible. How do we sort the hype from the truth?

>> [sighs] That's a hard question to answer. Um, at the end of the day, I think you need to uh ask questions and um kind of apply judgment. If you hear ridiculous statements like numbers like I don't know, you know, a million cubits in three years. I mean, it doesn't quite even pass the red face test. Um, but I think it boils down to asking questions. If if you've got somebody um kind of giving a presentation and throwing out what you think are outlandish numbers and they won't let you ask questions, that would raise a red flag in my mind, right? You need to be able to ask questions. You need to be able to drill down. You need to be able to to to come up with an informed opinion. get academics engaged in the discussion to help evaluate what you're hearing. We not enough of that is going on right now. I think there's this tendency to just let people say whatever they want to say and you know maybe it'll all be good for the industry. I don't think that's the right answer. I think you know empty promises are create problems right and we must we must hold everybody accountable for you know what they're saying and what they're doing and there has to be proof points when when we talk about something like quantum supremacy we publish the paper we publish the data anybody can go out and recreate the results right um you know you you have to just make sure that there's data to support the claims that are being made but it's just common sense.

>> Yes. So then let me ask you I mean why should we why should we trust your technology and the road map? Is it because >> you know that there's been some publishing that you've done or what is the what is the pitch here?

>> Not some publishing. I mean, we we um we publish all the analysis, the data sets for all of our claims, right? Whenever we talk about a new advance, uh a new um a new scientific accomplishment, um we publish the results and then look at the track record, right? I mean you know we've our advantage system is our sixth generation a kneeling quantum computer sixth generation we are we've got an excellent track record of delivering what we say we are going to deliver ask that same question of others have they delivered what they've said they were going to deliver or does their roadmap keep changing does the technology base keep changing right um if they're constantly changing and not converging that's a red flag. We deliver. We deliver what we say we're going to deliver. We publish results. We publish data sets with our results. And if you feel like there's information that you need from us that you don't ask.

>> Okay, let's close with this. Uh there are people on the fence about D-Wave. What do you say to them?

>> You're nuts. [laughter] I mean, seriously. I mean, just look at everything we've discussed here today. Look at what some of our guests have said. I mean, we have quantum computing technology that is real today, that is delivering value today, that can help solve your hard problems today. And we now have revolutionary new gate model technology that you know is kind of at the forefront with respect to what is possible developed by you know a world leader in this space. I mean frankly all of the superconducting cubits that are in use today across everybody building superconducting systems were developed by Rob Schulov >> right transmine cubit dual rail is where he went when he realized that something different was required to actually be successful.

>> Well Dr. Barretts I have really enjoyed we've been speaking a couple times over the past few weeks. I've really enjoyed learning about the cutting edge of quantum from you and excited to continue to follow the journey and I hope we can speak again soon.

>> I hope so as well.

>> All right. Thank you very much.

>> Great. Thank you everybody. [applause]

Okay. So, I said it before and I will say it again. I'm consistent if nothing else. I believe that D-Wave is now the world's leading quantum computing company. We're the only quantum computing company in the world that has a dual platform approach both analing and gate to be able to address the full quantum market and provide one-stop shop for our customers. We are the only quantum computing company that has been able to solve important real world problems that cannot be solved classically. Full stop. We are the only quantum computing in the world that has productionra inuse commercial applications. Customers are using our systems as a part of their business operations today. And now we're the only quantum computing company in the world that has the technologies needed to efficiently and effectively address the two key challenges associated with commercial gate model quantum computers, error correction and scaling. And then of course we've just significantly increased our already worldclass team here at D-Wave by adding by almost doubling the number of quantum physicists and quantum engineers a part of D-Wave. So today we were the first to market with a commercial beyond classical quantum computer. That is our advantage to 4500 cubit annealing quantum computer. Tomorrow I'm convinced we will be the first to market with a scaled error corrected gate model quantum computer. This is a really important moment for the quantum industry. It's a really important moment for D-Wave. Uh I'm excited to have the opportunity to spend roughly the last hour and a half with you. We have a lot of uh you know amazing things to share with you going forward throughout the course of the rest of the day today and tomorrow. All I can say is bring us your hard problems. Thank you.