Crypto experts who have monitored the situation for decades know that quantum computing is not a cybersecurity threat to take lightly. Regulatory bodies have already moved to suggest mitigation measures, and NIST has finalized its principal set of encryption algorithms. The national security community has also provided a target: The NSA wants all national security systems quantum-resistant by 2035, which pushes procurement today.
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is thus now a product decision. For investors, that turns quantum risk into a near-term demand driver for vendors that can help enterprises migrate cryptography risks and modernize security stacks. Let's explore the landscape of opportunities stemming from addressing these looming cybersecurity gaps.
2026 Is An Inflection Point For Quantum Security
The market for quantum technologies could be as large as $97 billion by 2035, with quantum computing being the biggest share of the market over the next decade.
Meanwhile, the industry leans into hybrid workflows where classical systems steer quantum jobs, as seen in IBM’s work on error mitigation at utility scale. The near-term opportunity is less about breaking RSA tomorrow, and more about software, where algorithmic advances are shifting attention from raw qubits to tools and stacks, a trend highlighted by the software pivot in quantum. Put differently, the investment case for quantum computing stocks in 2026 centers on quantum-safe deployments and real customers rather than science experiments or hyped claims.
Cloud vendors and networks are already enabling PQC security measures. Google has enabled hybrid Kyber key exchange in Chrome, and Cloudflare has rolled out post-quantum support to origins. These deployments are not a guarantee of stock returns by investing in solutions vendors, but they validate a market that quantum computing and cybersecurity stocks can sell into. And that market is almost certainly going to be growing.
Before we dig into the details, here's a quick table to orient your diligence process.
Now let’s go deeper on each name, with a clear eye on catalysts and risks.
IonQ Is a Government-validated Platform Trying to Scale Commercially
Procurement signals are solid gold when it comes to predicting future revenue.
On that note, IonQ has won sizable U.S. Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) work, including a $54.5 million award and a follow-on $21.1 million project, both focused on secure networking and scaling trapped-ion systems. Government contracts aren't profits, yet they validate a use case with national-security urgency. Plus, once government agencies build a relationship with a vendor, it often becomes very difficult for that vendor to go out of business, as the government's reliance on them is a near-guarantee of reliable revenue even if profitability is absent.
On the numbers, the company reported recognized revenue of $20.7 million in Q2 2025 and raised its annual guidance on the quarterly results page. Those updates matter because federal PQC deadlines and enterprise harvest-now-crack-later concerns create a demand pool for quantum-safe workflows and secure computation primitives, even if many deployments are hybrid or pre-advantage.
Here is what to watch for IonQ over the next year, if things go as management plans:
Additional public-sector awards that reference secure quantum networking.
Commercial cloud usage tied to hybrid workloads on major platforms.
Progress against revenue guidance on the investor site.
The strategic backdrop extends to software and distribution. As governments push toward quantum-resistant systems by 2035, vendors that can package quantum compute into secure, auditable services have a lane. Nonetheless, earnings remain negative and the timeline to utility depends on advances like error mitigation at scale.
Arqit: A Quantum-Safe Encryption Pitch
Arqit pursues a different angle, selling symmetric key agreement as software, marketed as quantum-safe encryption for networks and devices. Its software offers integrations with VPNs and network equipment, as highlighted by a launch that plugged its service into Juniper SRX devices. The product proposition lands squarely in the harvest-now-crack-later threat model.
The issue with this company is (at least for now) execution, or lack thereof. In May, it reported just $67,000 in first-half revenue with cost cuts and selective contract wins. It'll likely experience negative earnings next year.
Arqit is for investors who believe crypto-migration is a multi-year project and who can accept volatility. To underwrite it, you would want evidence of enterprise adoption and clarity on standards parlance like ML-KEM in FIPS 203, even if the company’s approach favors symmetric exchange rather than lattice primitives in TLS.
D-Wave Is Building Annealing For Optimization
Gate-model systems get the headlines, but D-Wave lives in the annealing corner that solves certain optimization problems well. That could give it a clearer path to scaling its revenue than some of its peers.
The company and partners have demoed defense-style applications like interceptor assignment and radar scheduling, and they continue to expand access through cloud channels such as AWS integrations around Braket. For buyers in cyber operations, optimization engines can support scheduling, anomaly scoring, and resource allocation, while cryptography transitions proceed in parallel.
For D-Wave, the near-term watch items are:
Customer wins tied to mission workloads like defense optimization.
Growth in cloud throughput via AWS channels and toolchains.
Evidence that bookings convert to reported revenue momentum.
The company's finances are still, generously speaking, at an early stage. D-Wave reported Q2 2025 revenue of $3.1 million alongside far larger losses, and it faces a long runway to becoming break-even.
Even so, the company promotes an SLA-style cloud footprint with its Leap service for real-time access, which can reduce friction in pilot projects that feed production demand. Investors should treat this like a call option on annealing’s product-to-market fit with near-term, security-relevant optimization.
How To Approach These Opportunities
So what's an investor to do, given these companies to watch?
The most important thing to recognize is that there is a regulatory standards tailwind here. NIST has already published FIPS 203, 204, and 205, and U.S. agencies are coordinating under a White House quantum security memorandum. The E.U. is encouraging alignment through a Commission PQC recommendation for member states. Asian countries, particularly China, South Korea, and Japan, will likely need to advance with new standards as well.
That means if you are positioning in the relevant stocks now, you're positioning towards the start of the commercialization process which will help companies to meet and implement the standards rather than towards the end. Therefore risk will be much higher, but selecting the right assets will also likely deliver outsized returns compared to a later entry.
The main counterargument to investing in the field right now is that utility remains narrow and the various research, production, and marketing timelines of the competitors are guaranteed to slip. Investors should assume that volatility will be the norm, and make peace with the fact that many of the segment's winners may be established cybersecurity vendors rather than pure-play quantum hardware names. Don't even think about betting the farm on quantum computing stocks, they're still speculative in nature.
A practical way to underwrite these themes are to focus on businesses with defensible gross margins in excess of 60% on a quarterly basis, and those which can increase the pace of standards adoption by way of dramatically reducing the friction of doing so for their customers.
Runners-up And Final thoughts
If you want to add some depth to your watchlist beyond the three stocks we've discussed so far, consider adding:
Rigetti Computing as a gate-model contender trying to cross the utility gap. The company has made its 84-qubit device generally available on Braket and it reports low but visible quarterly revenue in 2025. It has also published some data suggesting steady progress toward higher two-qubit fidelities. This one sits in the "show me" bucket.
Cloudflare has moved PQC into Zero Trust products in 2025 while publishing detailed guidance on PQC deployment across its network. For diversified portfolios, those execution tracks can matter more than qubit counts, and except for those who are expecting moonshots, will probably offer a more satisfying long-term compounding return profile.
2026's investment landscape is less about hype and more about planned migration. If your investment thesis assumes some kind of overnight quantum advantage, either in cracking or in security solutions, you will likely be disappointed. If your thesis assumes a slow but broad-based upgrade, with early adopters being seen as somewhat paranoid and panicked late-adopters eventually being seen as irresponsible and subject to over-spending in haste, you have room for upside surprises at multiple points of this trend.
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