Forget This Cash-Burning Quantum Speculation and Buy the Stock With a Real Enterprise Backlog

Rigetti Computing (NASDAQ:RGTI) is back in every quantum chat room after running 53.6% in a month on hopes that its 108-qubit system finally turns research into revenue. But here’s what you should actually be watching.

The Rigetti story sounds great until you read the income statement. Full-year 2025 revenue declined to $7.09 million from $10.79 million in 2024, a 34.31% drop. Q1 2026 looked better on the surface at $4.4 million, but the headline $33.1 million GAAP net income came from a $53.7 million favorable swing in derivative warrant liabilities, an accounting artifact, while the actual operation lost $26 million and burned $16.2 million in operating cash. Management offers no formal revenue guidance, and Rigetti itself flags fault-tolerant quantum computing as a longer-term objective with an uncertain timeline.

Now stack that against the valuation. Alpha Vantage pegs the trailing price-to-sales ratio at 867 on $10 million in trailing revenue. The CFO and CTO have been disposing of stock into the rally, with the CTO unloading nearly 19,000 shares on May 22, 2026. Retail is already wobbling: r/stocks discussions on May 22, 2026 ran “very bearish” with posts like “Quantum stocks are sham / don’t buy the pop today.” When the only thing growing reliably is the share count, that signals a hype cycle.

IonQ (NYSE:IONQ | IONQ Price Prediction) is doing what Rigetti keeps promising. Three reasons it deserves your attention instead.

1. A real, contracted backlog

IonQ closed Q1 2026 with remaining performance obligations of $470 million, up 554% year over year. That is contracted, visible future revenue, the kind of number retirement investors should care about. Rigetti’s order book is still measured in one-off chip sales.

2. Enterprise validation across clouds and customers

IonQ is the only pure-play quantum provider natively integrated across all three major public clouds (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud). Q1 brought the first 256-qubit system sale to the University of Cambridge, a $39 million Space Development Agency HALO contract, selection for the Missile Defense Agency SHIELD IDIQ, and selling into more than 30 countries. Revenue mix is roughly 60% commercial and 35% international. That is enterprise utility at commercial scale.

3. Scale, growth, and a cash cushion to fund it

Q1 revenue hit $64.7 million, up 755% year over year and 30% above the midpoint of guidance. Management raised full-year guidance to $260 million to $270 million, with organic growth over 100%. CEO Niccolo de Masi told investors IonQ is “raising our revenue expectations for the full year to $270 million at the high end, based upon the strong and growing demand for our leading quantum computers.” The company sits on $493.5 million in cash against shareholders’ equity of $4.99 billion, with a pending SkyWater Technology acquisition aimed at vertically integrating chip fabrication.

Both names burn cash. Both trade at speculative multiples. The difference is that IonQ already shipped a fourth consecutive record quarter, has guidance you can model, and a backlog Wall Street can underwrite. Rigetti has a balance sheet and a story.

What to watch next: IonQ’s ability to convert its $470 million backlog into recognized revenue, and whether Rigetti can produce organic top-line growth to justify its valuation.