Finding the best quantum computing stocks is less about chasing a single ticker and more about matching a given company's technical roadmap and business model to your desired returns, risk tolerance, and time horizon.
As you probably know already, quantum computing hardware is still rudimentary, with progress arriving in fitful step-changes rather than incrementally. So, the most credible forecasts about the development of the industry are spread across a very wide range, and it's unclear who will be correct. Depending on the forecast you read, the market could be valued at about $4.0 billion by 2030 or $20.2 billion by 2030, and some, like the McKinsey consultancy, suggest that it may reach between $28 to $72 billion by 2035. This kind of dispersion of estimates is actually a feature rather than a bug in the context of an emerging industry with uncertain downstream impacts over the long run.
It’s also important to separate hype from milestones that actually change the investable landscape. For instance:
IBM’s disclosure of its 1,121-qubit Condor processor and the growth of the IBM Quantum Network show continued scaling and tangible results.
Google’s 2019 experiment claiming quantum supremacy on Sycamore and its 2024 Willow chip announcement point to steady error-correction progress even if monetization of the work is still far off.
On the annealing front, D-Wave has publicized a materials simulation performed in minutes that would allegedly take nearly 1 million years classically. Reasonable people can debate the interpretations of all of these data, but the point is that these are the kind of data points that matter the most when trying to evaluate investments.
Before we dig into the candidates which might be worthy of investment, let's step back for a moment. The "best" quantum computing stock, for the purposes of this article, means:
A quality business with credible technical traction plus a path to reaching customers and generating cash. |
There are a handful of companies that fit within those criteria, and it isn't possible to pick only one as the end-all of the category, because what's "best" for one investor's goals and needs will be different than what's best for another investor. So, we'll go over the cream of the crop and then detail which might be a good fit for who and why.
The State of Play For The Best Quantum Computing Stocks
At a high level, quantum computing systems fall into different modalities and thus different business models.
Pure-plays sell access to quantum computing technologies through cloud marketplaces and direct relationships with customers, whereas big tech companies wrap their emerging quantum computing offerings into a broader array of diversified services including cloud computing infrastructure and AI stacks, among many other lines of business.
The table below gives a compact view of five widely watched stocks, their strengths, and why each deserves either attention or caution.
Company | Modality | Cloud access | Notable milestone | Commercial traction | Why watch or be cautious |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
IonQ (IONQ) | Trapped- ion | Broad cloud availability and rising bookings are positives; valuation and losses argue for position sizing discipline | |||
D-Wave (QBTS) | Annealing | Materials simulation in minutes | Real-world optimization focus is compelling; modality is narrower than gate-based peers and losses remain heavy | ||
Rigetti (RGTI) | Speed and vertical integration are strengths; revenues remain small and volatility is high versus giants | ||||
IBM (IBM) | IBM Quantum Network | Condor at 1,121 qubits | $62.8 billion 2024 revenue base built from diversified computing services | Balance sheet and ecosystem reduce risk; quantum is a small segment inside a large company | |
Alphabet (GOOGL) | Superconducting gate-model | Google Cloud | Willow chip | Massive diversified computing and advertising business | Resources and research pedigree help; quantum is not a near-term revenue driver relative to AI and ads |
A few observations are worth calling out here.
IonQ’s breadth of access across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Marketplace is unusual for a pure-play, and its 2024 revenue growth to $43.1 million shows real demand from early adopters, if not necessarily a clear path to profitability.
D-Wave continues to lean into optimization, and its claimed advantage result on a physics simulation is documented in both a company release and third-party coverage such as HPCwire.
Rigetti’s value proposition rests on execution speed, where two-qubit gates in the 60–80 ns range matter for deeper circuits, along with government-backed projects like DARPA IMPAQT.
IBM and Alphabet provide scale and staying power, with IBM’s Condor and Alphabet’s Willow marking concrete steps forward.
With these considerations in mind, it doesn't really make sense to simply buy one of these stocks and wait.
Getting Quantum Computing Stock Exposure The Right Way
Investors asking about the best quantum computing stocks usually mean two things:
Which names have credible technical roadmaps.
Which names balance risk against staying power.
While it's not really an answer, one smart way to work around these two questions is to reduce the risk of being wrong with the answer you develop for either by diversifying your investment across several relevant companies.
One way to do that is to build a barbell combining riskier plays with less-risky ones. Buying a small basket of pure-plays (or even just two) gives you exposure to upside from new milestones and new technology development, while a smaller allocation to the more mature and more diversified platforms lowers the chance that a single setback for the industry will take out your portfolio in its entirety.
Let's look at a real-world example for an investor with $5,000 to allocate and a slightly above-average risk tolerance, which is to say that they'd be:
Somewhat underwhelmed by slightly above-market returns
Accepting of below-market returns on some years if there's still an expectation of outperformance later on
Unhappy with any significant unrealized loss of the starting capital.
IonQ is leaning into hybrid workflows with NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q, while D-Wave’s optimization niche is starting to generate revenue; buying $1,000 of IonQ and D-Wave means getting exposure to two different quantum computing modalities and two relatively early-stage businesses, so there's more than one chance to win.
On the platform side, IBM and Alphabet's quantum activity sit inside a giga-cap company, and Alphabet’s applied research segment complements a cloud business that posted $96.5 billion in Q4 2024 revenue across services.
Buying $1,500 of each means anchoring the portfolio to their performance with a bit more weighting than what's allocated to the pure-plays, which is appropriate because it'll largely mitigate their volatility as well as their risk. Neither IBM nor Alphabet are dependent on their quantum computing efforts for their future performance, so there's a lot less upside specific to the field with both -- but that's the whole point, as problems that could wipe out IonQ or D-Wave won't bother the bigger players much at all.
If you want to boost your exposure to the pure-plays on an event-driven basis without distorting the overall diversification of your portfolio, investors using a barbell strategy always have the ability to buy long-dated call options on the pure-plays. If you're wrong, you'll lose the money used to buy the options, but it'll be a contained loss rather than something that could be a disaster. But, that requires a higher risk tolerance, as well as a bit more financial acumen to implement intelligently.
For those with lower risk tolerances, it makes more sense to weight your investments more towards the diversified players, potentially entirely so. Buying equal amounts of NVIDIA, Alphabet, and IBM will result in a portfolio with a fair bit of exposure to quantum computing-based upside, but without the massive downside risks of buying pure-plays. In such a scenario, it could then also make sense to invest in a lone pure-play that uses those companies as suppliers, or targets them as customers.
On the other hand, those who are looking to take on significant risk or who seek to concentrate rather than diversify so as to juice their returns will probably get the most mileage from a collection of the best two or three pure-plays alone. But, even for these investors, it is very inadvisable to concentrate solely into one of the pure-plays, as the risk of getting wiped out is far too high. If one quantum computing platform ends up taking off, like neutral atoms or perhaps photonics, it's very likely that the industry will be a winner-take-all situation, with efforts quickly converging on the thing that has been proven to work and abandoning those taking other approaches.
Similarly, while it's technically possible to pursue an options-based strategy to get the equivalent of levered exposure to some of these businesses, the risks involved are too great to approach for most investors. And there's not much to gain by buying options on the tech giants, as it doesn't grant that much additional exposure to the investing theme in question for the risk.
Here are a few practical checkpoints to track over time. These are not exhaustive, just the most investable signals.
Fault tolerance and error correction roadmaps.
Government policy and funding posture, including the DOE Quantum Leadership Act of 2025 and the National Quantum Initiative’s annual report data.
Tight coupling to classical accelerators and important collaborators
Credible, peer-scrutinized demonstrations of advantage and a willingness to publish methods for external scrutiny.
A quick word on expectations: The field has a long history of high-profile claims and subsequent debate. Investors will do better if they anchor on reproducible results and steady improvements in error rates and algorithmic performance rather than chasing headlines.
Tying It All Together
Which mix of the best quantum computing stocks fits your time horizon and risk budget? Only you can decide that. But, when you do, consider that pretty much any investment thesis you can make about the stocks in this field will need to work on their core projects for at least three to five years, and, as mentioned previously, the pure plays are going to be much riskier than the bigger diversified companies, though if they succeed at their goals, their returns could be much higher as well.
Additionally, be aware that the group of leaders we discussed today may not always be at the frontier of the industry. At the same time, if fault tolerance timelines converge faster than expected and hybrid workflows proliferate through CUDA-Q and cloud marketplaces, pure-plays can re-rate their pricing sharply to the upside. The opposite is also true if engineering milestones prove difficult to attain. That asymmetry is the point of creating small, carefully-sized positions with your quantum computing investments rather than all-in wagers.
One final thing to remember: This industry has more roadmaps than revenue-generating products or services. If you are buying something because a tweet says "quantum is the next big thing," you're outsourcing your risk management and investing process to the crowd, which is unlikely to work very well. Anchor your investing activity in published results and cash-flow math, and let time do the work of either compounding value, or revealing where would be a better bet.
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Disclaimer: This article is for information and education; it is not financial advice. Nobody involved in Quantum Canary owns any of the stocks mentioned as of publication.
