D-Wave Quantum: A Platinum Booth in Maryland, a Seoul Stage in October, and the Bookings-to-Revenue Gap That Decides Everything

D-Wave takes platinum sponsorship at Quantum World Congress 2026 and plans October's Qubits Asia in Seoul, as its CFO retires and bookings outpace revenue.

D-Wave Quantum has booked the platinum sponsorship slot at the Quantum World Congress 2026, running September 23–25 in College Park, Maryland, where it intends to put both of its computing architectures on display — the annealing systems and the newer gate-model technology. The company has also set October for Qubits Asia 2026 in Seoul, a user conference that will showcase case studies from Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, including work with LG CNS and several universities.

Two stages, two months, one argument to make. Selling a dual-platform strategy means demonstrating on stage that each platform does something the other cannot — and that, rather than the square footage of a booth, is the real test.

A finance chief departs, and the market shrugs

Behind the conference calendar, a quieter change has taken place. CFO John Markovich retired in early September, with Senior Vice President of Finance Greg Golkov stepping in on an interim basis. The company said the departure had nothing to do with disputes over business operations, policies or accounting practices, and no disagreements over controls or finances have come to light.

Ordinarily a CFO exit at a growth-stage company invites jitters. Here, a different narrative has crowded it out: the funding arrangement locked in with the US Department of Commerce under the CHIPS and Science Act, giving D-Wave access to as much as $100 million for quantum research, hardware development and manufacturing. That is fresh capital without conventional debt — and a new shareholder group with strategic interests of its own. A leadership gap in a sensitive phase nonetheless remains.

What the tape says

The stock has been pulled between two forces: durable skepticism toward unprofitable quantum computing bets, and periodic votes of confidence from Washington and the conference circuit. Shares changed hands pre-market Friday at EUR 15.66, up 1.7%, after closing Thursday at EUR 15.40. Over seven days the gain is 8.1%; over 30 days the stock is down 5.4%, so the recent rebound follows a stretch of weakness. Year to date the paper is still off 31%, and it sits 61% below its 52-week high of EUR 40.41 set in October.

Thursday's session itself brought an 8.6% advance to EUR 15.41, triggered by a bundle of news: the Seoul conference announcement and a fresh Outperform rating with a $35 price target. The analyst case rests on D-Wave's first-mover advantage and its dual technology strategy spanning annealing and gate-model systems. The timing matters because the company had already sent several positive signals — the $100 million CHIPS award, productive NTT DOCOMO deployments — and a well-regarded house now attaching a concrete target gives that chain of news additional weight.

Momentum indicators, though, have yet to confirm a turn. The shares trade 3.0% below their 50-day moving average and 16% below the 200-day, and a 30-day annualized volatility of 64% keeps the environment friendly to sharp short-term swings regardless of fundamentals.

The gap that has to close

The single factor that will settle D-Wave's valuation over the coming months is how bookings translate into recognized revenue. Second-quarter 2026 revenue came in at just $3.1 million, essentially flat year over year. First-half bookings, meanwhile, climbed 1,120% to $35.5 million, driven by a single $20 million system sale. First-half revenue fell 67% to $5.9 million, a decline explained by a large system sale in the 2025 comparison period. Promising order intake, in other words, has not yet arrived as durable revenue.

The technology side offers reasons for optimism. Results published in Nature in August described a superconducting two-qubit gate with roughly 99.9% fidelity and operation times of about 500 nanoseconds, underpinning the gate-model claim. On the annealing side, NTT DOCOMO cut peak load on location-registration signals by about 65% and reduced paging signals by 7% in its mobile network using D-Wave technology.

Convert those pilots into recurring, revenue-generating contracts and the CHIPS funding provides the financial base to scale toward a planned 100,000-qubit annealing system and a 10,000-qubit gate-model system.

Two paths from here

Should bookings momentum keep converting into actual revenue over the next few quarters, and should the late-October Asia conference produce further commercial partnerships along the NTT DOCOMO lines, the $35 target set by BMO Capital stands as a realistic reference point. If bookings roll over again, or revenue stays structurally behind expectations, the current rebound risks dissolving back into the broader downtrend in place since the October high.

Until then, the appearances in College Park and Seoul are the clearest gauges of whether announcements become binding contracts.