D-Wave Quantum (NYSE:QBTS) shares are up 7% to $19.29 in Monday morning trading after the company announced an expanded agreement with AT&T (NYSE:T | T Price Prediction) to deploy its annealing quantum systems across network operations.
The catalyst is company-specific, yet the reaction is sector-wide. D-Wave Quantum stock is leading the tape by name recognition, but the sympathy names are actually outrunning it. IonQ (NYSE:IONQ) shares are up 12% to $36.67, Rigetti Computing (NASDAQ:RGTI) stock is up 12% to $15.88, and Quantum Computing (NASDAQ:QUBT) shares are up 8% to $8.06.
The Defiance Quantum ETF (NYSEARCA:QTUM) is up 1% to $141.12, a milder move that reflects its broader compute exposure. Today’s rally comes inside a sharp drawdown for the pure-play names, giving traders a bounce within a longer-term drawdown.
Expanded AT&T Deal Fuels the Rally
D-Wave and AT&T signed an expanded agreement covering network operations, with an early application cutting a network optimization workload from about one hour to under 15 seconds, a 240x speedup using D-Wave’s annealing technology. AT&T plans to extend the work to outage detection, technician routing, network build planning, and traffic management.
AT&T is also evaluating D-Wave’s forthcoming gate-model systems for quantum security and communications. This is a concrete enterprise deployment tied to hard metrics, which is the piece the sector has been missing.
Benchmark added fuel by initiating D-Wave Quantum stock at Buy with a $30 price target. CEO Alan Baratz has framed AT&T’s expansion as evidence that annealing is moving from proof-of-concept into production workloads.
Rigetti Gets Its Own HPE Catalyst
Rigetti Computing shares are running with a second, name-specific catalyst. The company is expanding its collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to build “TangleLab,” a hybrid quantum-classical supercomputing testbed funded by a $5 million National Science Foundation grant.
Rigetti will deliver a 9-qubit Novera quantum system integrated with classical high-performance computing. Construction is expected to begin September 1 at PSC’s new data center, with full operations expected in 2027. That timeline underlines both the opportunity and the wait involved in this thesis.
Peers Rally on Enterprise Adoption Sentiment
The read-through is straightforward. One credible enterprise deal is lifting the entire complex on adoption sentiment, and the sympathy names are outrunning the actual beneficiary. That’s classic thematic momentum trading.
The bounce comes inside deep drawdowns. D-Wave Quantum stock is down 27% year to date, IonQ stock is down 16% year to date, Rigetti Computing stock is down 29% year to date, and Quantum Computing stock is down 22% year to date. The Defiance Quantum ETF, which spreads exposure across broader compute names, remains up 29% year to date.
Bull Case, Bear Case, and What to Watch
The bull case rests on real customer traction. AT&T’s 240x speedup is a hard number, Benchmark’s Buy rating gives sell-side cover, and Rigetti’s NSF-funded HPE testbed shows federal research dollars flowing into hybrid architectures. D-Wave’s own $588.4 million cash position and $33.4 million in bookings from Q1 FY2026 support a runway argument.
The bear case is the valuation and the wait. D-Wave stock carries a price-to-sales ratio of 482.56 against TTM revenue of $12.44 million. TangleLab doesn’t reach full operations until 2027, and prediction markets currently price only a 25.5% probability that the U.S. federal government takes an equity stake in IonQ by year-end 2026.
Investors sizing their exposure here can keep their positions modest given a beta of 2.1 on D-Wave stock and the QTUM ETF’s narrow thematic concentration. The next cues are whether today’s gains hold into the close and whether other carriers follow AT&T’s lead with their own commercial announcements.
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