Quantum computing keeps inching towards being a line item on the budget of technology companies.
In the last year, investors have watched a major bank run a live pilot on quantum hardware, including a bond-trading test that showed a 34% improvement in predicting fill probability. At the same time, blue chip businesses are laying out roadmaps that pull timelines forward, with IBM saying its quantum plus HPC approach can deliver quantum advantage by the end of 2026, while Google's team published some compelling evidence of error correction on its Willow chip. If you have wondered how to position your capital before utility actually arrives and starts generating real revenue, you're not alone.
Here, we'll sketch the investable landscape of quantum computing businesses, weigh investing in pure plays against diversified routes, and set expectations for timelines and risk. By the time you're done reading, you'll have a bit more clarity on how to invest in quantum computing stocks without confusing possibility with probability.
The Investable Quantum Computing Universe
Before buying anything, it helps to know who does what, and why those activities matter in the larger context of the industry.
Public pure play companies, which is to say companies that are focusing on building products rather than platforms, include IonQ, D-Wave Quantum, and Rigetti Computing, among many others.
IonQ leans on trapped-ion systems and sells through cloud marketplaces, with its Forte Enterprise system now globally available on Amazon Braket. In contrast, D-Wave focuses on annealing for optimization, and it offers production access via its Leap cloud service. Rigetti continues to build superconducting systems and is an Azure Quantum provider. And larger players like IBM and Google are pursuing a blended approach of offering specific solutions as well as larger platforms for quantum computing.
To make the leading players and channels easier to compare, use the table as a quick reference.
Numbers and roadmaps are useful, but they still need translation into investable theses. That starts with examining business model factors like monetization strategies as well as other factors like valuable collaborations and noteworthy customers.
IonQ monetizes its services through cloud consumption and multi-year collaborations, including Braket distribution and a drug-discovery workflow with AstraZeneca that pairs quantum with GPUs, as described in Amazon's Braket hub and in IonQ's AstraZeneca-AWS-NVIDIA update.
D-Wave leans on bookings for annealing workloads, which rose sharply in 2024 per its year-end release and analysis at The Quantum Insider.
Rigetti's path runs through Azure Quantum endpoints, paired with a strong marketing team and better-than-average investor relations work.
While Google and IBM are not pure quantum equity plays owing to their massive and highly diversified businesses both within and outside of quantum computing, their disclosures and publicly-disclosed plans set the timelines for everyone. Even if you don't plan on ever owning their stocks, it's worth staying abreast of what they're saying as well as how quickly their research projects are proceeding. Before that, know that regardless of what you pick within the investable universe of these stocks, you'll need to develop an investment thesis for what it's worth buying and holding. If you can't articulate why a business is going to be higher value in the future than it is today, you shouldn't be buying it.
How To Invest In Quantum Computing Stocks
First, Pick Between Diversification or Concentration
There are two clean avenues for exposure to the quantum computing industry. You can:
Pick individual quantum stocks for upside that's specific to certain segments of the value chain, potentially including software segments like security service providers.
Hold an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that mixes quantum exposure and related exposure to the wider tech industry.
For example, the Defiance Quantum ETF (QTUM) tracks a machine learning and quantum index and routinely holds Nvidia and Microsoft. That construction spreads risk across the toolchain, but it also means that the fund's weighting gives investors more exposure to the performance of AI heavyweights than to quantum computing itself. Of course, investors can also buy a basket of the stocks of quantum computing pure plays for more granular control while still getting some diversification, though it's at the cost of doing considerably more due diligence work, which takes time to do well.
A sensible starting allocation for this emerging theme is small. Many investors cap an allocation to frontier technologies at 5% to 10% of their portfolio value. That's a good plan here, because early-stage volatility can be tremendous, and it's difficult for most investors to remain emotionally stable during such volatility. There's also a high risk of many of the early players in the quantum computing space failing at their intended business models and their stocks subsequently going to zero, either promptly, or over a long bleed for years. |  |
If you take the ETF route, the biggest challenge is knowing what you're buying and why. Not every ETF is intended for every investor. In my experience, that goes double for ETFs that are intended to give exposure to emerging fields, so you'll need to read the fine print and you'll need to be picky about what you actually buy.
The first thing to be attentive to is that some funds will include stocks from companies that produce upstream components like cryogenic hardware, control electronics, and data-center infrastructure, whereas others won't.
Incorporating upstream assets in the mix can smooth drawdowns, as the companies are likely to have many other customers outside of the quantum computing world
It also dilutes the potency of the quantum exposure you might be seeking.
Other options, like ETFs that incorporate native leverage, could give you a wild ride that ends up being unprofitable even if the assets inside the ETF are ones that you're generally happy to own. So here's a short list of questions that'll be useful for choosing your path:
Do you want targeted exposure to milestones like system launches and bookings, or are you content to own the broader compute stack through an ETF that includes things outside of quantum?
Are you willing to underwrite multi-year losses that may occur when buying and holding pure plays, or would you rather see diversified cash flows from big players that are aiming to make platforms, at the expense of more diversification than you might prefer?
Do you have the time, patience, attention span, energy, and context to fully analyze a pure play company, or would you prefer to stay focused on the field's big picture with an ETF?
If you decide to stock pick, remember to invest gradually and be ready to hold for a few years. If you choose an ETF, look for low fees and the exposure profile you want, and be aware that the assets in the fund may be highly correlated to each other, especially if they're primarily pure plays. Generally, your portfolio distribution should reflect the amount of knowledge you have and can expect to gain about the topic.
Stay Informed
In a quickly-developing field like quantum computing, you can't set and forget your investments, particularly not when you're holding pure plays. You need to stay up to date on the industry's developments as they occur, as such developments have a very high probability of directly affecting your investment thesis.
Timelines can move very quickly, and investments can change in value very quickly when new information is released.
For example:
HSBC's pilot with IBM hardware reported a 34% reduction in error on predicting bond trade fills. IBM's public roadmap points to advantage by 2026, while independent reporting outlines fault-tolerant ambitions later in the decade, such as IBM's 2029 target for fault tolerance.
Google's team continues to publish milestones on Willow and QEC, including below-threshold performance.
Progress in technical capabilities, customer onboarding, and capital formation, among other vectors, have the potential to change the competitive dynamics in the industry overnight, and sometimes that might be to your advantage.
On the startup side, funding has recently concentrated in larger rounds -- recipients of those larger rounds, even if they aren't yet public, are often worth keeping track of.
QuEra expanded a 2025 raise to $230 million with strategic participation, and industry trackers suggest an average round size of $28.6 million this year. Separately, industrial deals matter because they create downstream demand; today's funding recipients usually become another company's customers tomorrow. Pasqal agreed to deploy a 200-qubit machine in Saudi Arabia in 2025, a signal that government and energy verticals plan to test neutral-atom hardware in situ.
Two practical habits can help investors to separate useful signals from ambient noise here.
Track access channels because they create usage. IonQ's presence on Amazon Braket is a tangible funnel to customers, as are Rigetti's endpoints on Azure Quantum and D-Wave's Leap program. Cases where those channels are granted exclusively are all the more valuable.
Keep an eye on index constituents in ETFs because additions and deletions shift factor exposure. Newly-launched ETFs are likely to emphasize their exposure to new and highly-hyped businesses, which can be a useful signal regarding where the rest of the market thinks there's value in store.
As you stay up to date on the latest info, remain skeptical of hyperbolic claims. Likewise, understand that price is often the most important component in a stock's narrative -- and also that a stock's narrative is the average of the market's expectations, not something that's strictly tied to its actual financial performance in the present.
Over the long run, markets reward real revenue growth and verified utility.
Plan For Risks, Volatility, And Patience
Quantum computing remains a high-uncertainty field because error-corrected machines are expensive to build and operate.
Even with below-threshold experiments, logical qubit counts and gate fidelities need to climb for practical advantage, as Google explains in its Willow summary on making error correction work. Market sizing estimates are also quite wide as a result of the uncertainty inherent to the field. McKinsey projects quantum computing could be worth $28 billion to $72 billion by 2035, and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimates a potential economic value of $450 billion to $850 billion by 2040. Forecasts vary because adoption hinges on error correction, system scale, and integration into classical workflows, and everyone's financial model for those factors is fairly different.
Final Advice for Investors
For investors, the approach is to be cautious:
Limit your exposure to a portion of your portfolio that you could tolerate losing.
Define a holding period of at least 5 to 10 years.
Treat rising prices as a chance to rebalance or incrementally add exposure to a winner rather than a reason to double down.
If you want a bolder stance, own both a pure play and an ETF so you are not betting everything on one architecture or one commercialization plan.
Screen for favorable access channels, steadily-executed roadmaps, and solid cash runways.
Prefer businesses with real user funnels, credible partnerships, and transparent metrics.
Use ETFs if you want exposure to the broader compute stack, and single names if you want leverage to discrete milestones. Buy progress rather than promises.
When you see verified steps like new availability on a major cloud, a large commercial booking, or a peer-reviewed error-correction result, that is the time to add incrementally. The sector will still lurch from headline to headline, but your plan should not.
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