[0:00]If you put $10,000 into Apple at the start of the smartphone era, you'd have over half a million dollars today. If you invested that money in Nvidia, when Chat GPT started the AI era just three years ago, you'd already have over $100 grand. Well, three big breakthroughs just kicked off the quantum computing era, and it's already something we can invest in. My name is Alex, and I spent eight years as an electrical engineer and AI researcher at MIT, and I've never seen back-to-back breakthroughs this big. So let me show you what just happened and how I'm investing in it. Your time is valuable, so let's get right into it. I want to start this video in an interesting place, CES 2025, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I was there in person when, during a press Q&A session, Jensen Huang told the world that useful quantum computers were 15 to 30 years away. The market reaction was instant and it was brutal. Ion Q dropped by about 39% in one day. Rigetti fell by 45%, and D-Wave crashed by 36%. One sentence from one CEO cratered an entire class of stocks. And then, something strange happened. Two months later, when I was at Nvidia GTC 2025, I saw Jensen change his tune. He said that quantum computing was closer than he thought, and he hosted the first ever Nvidia Quantum Day. Three months after that in Paris, he said that quantum was reaching an inflection point, and that it was going to solve some real problems in the coming years. Those comments ended up fueling the massive bubble in quantum computing stocks late last year. That bubble was so big that I decided not to cover quantum at all. Everything was already priced to perfection. But now, the bubble is behind us and something big just happened. Just two weeks ago, Nvidia shipped an open source software stack called Ising, which figures out how to split a problem between GPUs and quantum computers to get the best of both worlds. And they put Ion Q on the short list of early adopters. In the 10 years that I've been investing in Nvidia, I've never seen Jensen change his stance on any technology so fast. But now, I understand why. On the same day that Nvidia shipped Ising, Ion Q announced the first photonic interconnect between two separate commercial quantum processors. In English, that means that Ion Q linked two quantum chips together and got them to act like one. Kind of like how Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs get two compute dies to act like a single chip. That same day, Darpa picked Ion Q for a two-year program called HARQ, effectively giving them federal funding to scale their quantum systems. And just one week before that, Rigetti made the first 100 plus Cubit quantum computer generally available on AWS. Which means you can now rent a state-of-the-art quantum computer the same way you'd rent a regular server. So, in just one week, Nvidia released software to control quantum computers along with GPUs. Ion Q figured out how to connect theirs together, and Rigetti put theirs on the cloud. Quantum computing isn't science fiction anymore. It's an entire market sector that's finally worth investing in. And I'm not here to keep you hostage, so here are the three stocks I'm going to use to explain the market. Ion Q, ticker symbol IONQ, which uses photons to scale beyond single quantum chips. Rigetti Computing, ticker symbol RGTI, which has a 108 qubit processor you can already rent on AWS, and D-Wave, ticker symbol QBTS. A quantum company already solving big problems for even bigger customers, and of course, which of these three stocks I think is the best buy right now. I want to make the best use of your time, so let's start with what these companies have in common. And, uh, what the heck a quantum computer even is. In classical computing, a bit can either be a zero or a one, just like a coin can either be heads or tails. That's it. Every piece of software you've ever used, every app on your phone, every AI model, every spreadsheet, runs on those two binary numbers, one or zero, heads or tails, flipped billions of times every second. A cubit is like a weighted coin, where you can choose the weight. Before you flip it, it has some probability of heads and tails at the same time. You only know which way it landed once you flip the coin and you look at it.
[4:25]So until you see the result by measuring a cubit, it still has the probabilities of both one and zero, heads and tails. Now take a bunch of those quantum coins and link them all together so that when you check one, you instantly know how all the other coins could land. They follow a shared pattern instead of flipping independently. That's quantum entanglement, or at least it's my best attempt at understanding it. And when you entangle a system of cubits together, the math gets wild really fast. A single cubit has two possible states, zero or one, heads or tails. A system of two cubits has four states, 00, 01, 10, or 11. A system of three cubits has eight states. Eight is two to the third power. That means a system of 300 entangled cubits has two raised to the 300 different possible states, which is more possibilities than there are atoms in the observable universe. That's why quantum computers are exponentially more powerful than classical ones, at least for certain kinds of problems. Like optimization, simulation, cryptography, and certain kinds of machine learning. But there's a catch, cubits are insanely fragile and things like heat, vibration, or even a single stray photon can knock them out of their shared pattern, turning them back into regular ones and zeros. That's called decoherence. Keeping a cubit stable long enough to actually run a useful calculation is the entire name of the game. And every company in this video is making a different massive bet on the best way to do it. At the start of this video, I pointed out that Apple and Nvidia made investors rich by being the cornerstone companies of the mobile and AI computing eras. Well, the global quantum computing market is expected to more than 20x in size over the next 10 years, and could become a 40 billion dollar market by 2035. That's almost as fast as the growth of the AI market itself. According to Market US, the global artificial intelligence market is expected to almost 19x in size over the next nine years, which is a compound annual growth rate of 38.5% through 2034. But many of the companies building next generation AI applications are not publicly traded. Think about the 90s and early 2000s, companies like Amazon and Google went public very early in their growth cycle. But today, they're waiting an average of 10 years or longer to go public. That means investors like us can miss out on most of the returns from the next Amazon, the next Google, the next Nvidia. That's where VCX comes in, the sponsor of this video. VCX is the public ticker for private tech. Venture capital is usually only for the ultra wealthy, but VCX by Fundrise gives everyday investors access to some of the top private pre-IPO companies on Earth. They have an impressive track record, already investing over 500 million dollars in some of the largest, most in-demand AI, infrastructure, and space launch companies. So, if you want access to some of the best late stage companies before they IPO, check out VCX by Fundrise with my link below today. All right, so the quantum computing market is expected to grow at a 36% compound annual growth rate for the next decade. Over two times faster growth than the S&P 500. And that's before Nvidia started building infrastructure to support it, which will obviously increase adoption. And that brings us to Nvidia themselves. Nvidia isn't building a quantum chip. They're building the infrastructure between everyone else's quantum chips and their own GPUs. Late last year, at Nvidia's GTC DC conference, they announced something called NVQ link. A super fast connection that lets GPUs send instructions and read results in just a few millionths of a second. That's fast enough for GPUs to watch the cubits, correct their errors, and adjust things along the fly before the system decoheres. And then, just a couple weeks ago, they released Ising. That's an open source AI toolkit that helps quantum chips fix their own errors in real time. Ising also speeds up quantum calibration, which is a process that took days, but now takes just hours. As an investor, this made one thing crystal clear for me. Nvidia doesn't think quantum computers are going to replace GPUs. Or else, they obviously wouldn't build systems to support them. Instead, they see quantum computers plugging into our current data center infrastructure to help with very specific kinds of workloads. So the future will be about hybrid computing, a mix of CPUs, GPUs, and QPU's, all working together. But even if that happens, these companies still have some serious risks that you need to know about. First, their revenues are still small. Ion Q is the only one over 100 million dollars in revenue. Rigetti made just seven million dollars last fiscal year, and D-Wave made around 25 million. That's why their stocks can move by 30, 40, even 50% in a single day, in either direction, just like we saw over the last year. Second, they have serious customer concentration. Most of their money today comes from government and defense contractors, so any budget cuts would hit all three at once. And third, like I'm about to explain, well, explain, all three companies have fundamentally different approaches to quantum computing. That means today's winners could be tomorrow's losers, and you need to know that going in. All right, Ion Q is the current front runner in public quantum hardware. If I had to boil them down to a single sentence, Ion Q is the closest thing to being the Nvidia of quantum computing, if their approach ends up being the right way to go. Ion Q uses something called trapped ion systems, which uses charged atoms as the cubits, the coins we talked about before. It holds them in place with electromagnetic fields, and it controls them with lasers. This trapped ion approach gives Ion Q some of the highest quality cubits in the industry. They run slower, but they also have fewer errors, which means you can run them longer before the decoherence kicks in. And importantly, trapped ion systems are the easiest kind to network multiple chips together. Here's why that matters. The hard part about scaling quantum computers is that a single chip tops out at a few hundred cubits. But it takes tens of thousands of cubits to do things like certain kinds of cryptography, simulate real chemistry, and optimize global supply chains. So how do you scale from 100 to 10,000? You can try to build one giant chip, but nobody's figured out how to do that, or you can network multiple chips together. That's exactly what Ion Q just did last week when they announced the first photonic interconnect between two quantum processors. Proving this could even be done is a serious milestone the entire industry has been chasing since the 1990s. The path from 100 cubits to 10,000 is no longer science fiction. It's just a matter of time, money, and engineering. On the same exact day, Darpa added them to a program called HARQ, harnessing quantum computing at scale. Which basically means the US Department of Defense is willing to bet real money on Ion Q's solutions. And speaking of money, Ion Q reported $62 million in revenue last quarter, which is up a massive 429% year over year. They made $130 million for the full year, which is more than triple their year before, making them the only public quantum computing company to cross the $100 million dollar mark. But the special thing about Ion Q isn't just their revenue, it's their backlog, which grew to about $370 million, or almost three times their last year's revenue. And they're guiding for $235 million this year, which would imply around 80% revenue growth for 2026. One thing to be careful with, they reported a net income of $754 million. But that number was driven by a non-cash warrant re-evaluation gain of $950 million. That means they actually had an operating loss for the quarter, and their management actually expects larger losses in 2026 as they keep investing in their systems. On the balance sheet, Ion Q has roughly $3.3 billion in cash and short-term investments. That's a massive war chest for a company this small, and exactly what you want to offset so much execution risk. For investors, the takeaway here is simple. Ion Q has the biggest backlog and the strongest balance sheet in quantum computing. But you're still betting on an unprofitable, highly volatile stock where the core technology has real risks, and the market is still very small. That's what I mean when I say get in early, but getting in early is a double-edged sword. All right, let's talk about Rigetti Computing next. If Jensen Huang is right that quantum computers will work with GPUs instead of replacing them, then Rigetti is set up to win big. It's already plugged directly into Nvidia's NVQ link and CUDA Q stack for hybrid workloads. So any enterprise that wants Nvidia stack and quantum computing will be running on Rigetti's hardware. Quantum computers from Google, IBM, and Rigetti all rely on superconducting systems. Which use tiny electrical circuits that are cooled so close to absolute zero, that they behave like artificial atoms. They run around 4,000 times faster than the trapped ion cubits from Ion Q. But their errors are so much harder to control that they only end up being something like 10 times faster in practice. Those errors also make superconducting systems much harder to scale. But unlike IBM or Google, Rigetti is the only way to invest directly in this technology without investing in all the other much bigger business units as well. Rigetti also has the first 100 plus cubit processor available on AWS. AWS is the default cloud computing infrastructure for millions of developers around the world, and they all just got access to Rigetti's quantum computer. Now here's where Rigetti looks very different from a company like Ion Q. Their Q4 2025 revenue was just $1.9 million, and it was down 18% year over year. Their full year 2025 revenue was just $7.1 million. So Rigetti is still a pre-commercial company, and valuing them based on revenue won't get you very far. Instead, I'm watching their cash position and their milestones. Are they increasing the number of cubits in their systems, are more AWS customers using their chips, and are they getting more partnerships with hyper scalers in general, with government agencies, and are they getting more integrated with Nvidia. Rigetti finished the year with about $590 million in cash, and they're burning about $20 million a quarter. That means they have about 30 quarters of cash runway, or about 7.5 years. So don't mistake their lack of revenue for a lack of funding. And that brings us to D-Wave, the only company with a commercial product that customers actually pay for today. Not pilots and not research partnerships. Quantum annealing, like the kind in D-Wave's advantage line of systems, isn't really a general purpose computer. It's a specialized machine built to solve optimization problems like scheduling, routing, and materials design. The important thing for investors to know about this one is that companies like Volkswagen, Google, NASA, and Lockheed Martin already pay to run workloads on D-Wave's systems today. And in January of this year, D-Wave closed a $550 million acquisition of Quantum Circuits Inc, which gives them a gate-based quantum platform on top of their existing annealing business. Gate-based superconducting is more of a general purpose quantum computer, which complements D-Wave's more special quantum annealing systems. For investors, that means that D-Wave has two different quantum architectures under one roof. So D-Wave doesn't have to win the war to survive it. They only need one of them to work out long-term. That optionality is the unique thing about D-Wave. Last quarter, D-Wave's revenue came in at $2.8 million, up 19% year over year. But their business is still spiky and driven by big deals. Full year 2025 revenue came in at $24.6 million, which was actually up 179% year over year. In January and February of this year alone, they reported $32.8 million in new bookings, already more than their entire 2025 revenue in just two months. On April 14th at the Semafor World Economy Summit, D-Wave's CEO said that Nvidia should be shaking in their boots when it comes to quantum. That line landed on the same day that Nvidia launched Ising, and D-Wave's stock skyrocketed by around 50% that week. D-Wave has around $630 million on their balance sheet, and that's after acquiring Quantum Circuits Inc. They're currently burning around $70 million a year, which gives them almost a nine-year cash runway. So as an investor, I like that D-Wave has all the funding they need until they can become profitable themselves. All right, before we can decide which of these three stocks is the best buy right now, here's a table summarizing everything I covered. As you read through it, just keep a few things in mind. I built this table myself by pulling numbers from each company's latest earnings call, and I tried to make each row as apples to apples as possible. But Ion Q, Rigetti, and D-Wave all have different customers, different contract lengths, and fundamentally different approaches to quantum computing. So take this table as a good way to compare them, but not as official audited numbers. And now that we have all that context, we can answer the big question, which quantum computing company is the best investment right now? And if you feel I've earned it, consider hitting the like button and subscribing to the channel. That really helps me out, and it lets me know to make more content like this. Thanks. Now, let's talk about Ion Q, Rigetti, and D-Wave stock. Ion Q is the clear leader of the quantum computing pack. Their revenue grew by 428% year over year. They have a backlog of $370 million, and they're the only public company to link two commercial quantum computing chips together. So, if you're the kind of growth investor who waits for a company to prove its product market fit at scale before risking your own money, Ion Q is probably for you. If you believe that the future of quantum computing isn't overtaking CPUs and GPUs, but working alongside them, then Rigetti is the company connected to Nvidia's stack with NVQ link and CUDA Q. And they already have a quantum processor that any AWS customer can rent. Just remember, this is the smallest company with the smallest revenue and cash position of the three. So if you can stomach some execution risk and volatility in exchange for a shot at owning Nvidia's quantum future, Rigetti may be the stock for you. And D-Wave is for investors who like having their cake and eating it too. They already have paying customers today, and you get exposure to two different quantum architectures instead of betting on one, quantum annealing, and the gate-based superconducting architecture from their Quantum Circuits acquisition. D-Wave is growing almost as fast as Ion Q, but from a much smaller base, which isn't that big of a deal, since they already have enough cash to last for almost nine years. Personally, I want to own all three stocks for one simple reason. All three companies have fundamentally different approaches to building quantum computers at scale, and I don't know enough about the space to reliably pick a winner. So this is one of those times where I'd rather own the entire market than bet on a single stock. If I had to pick a winner based purely on market cap versus revenue, backlog and growth potential, I'd pick Ion Q, because they're already over $100 million in annual revenue. They have a $370 million backlog, and they're still growing by over 200% per year. So to me, they have the best risk-to-reward ratio of the three. But one thing's for sure, quantum computing is quickly moving from science fiction to a future worth investing in. Let me know which stock you're buying below. All three companies report earnings in early May, so let me know if you want me to follow up with a deep dive video on any one of them. And if you want to see more science behind the stocks, check out this video next. Either way, thanks for watching, and until next time, this is ticker symbol U. My name is Alex, reminding you that the best investment you can make is in you.
