Is Quantum in the money yet?
Nope
since Oct ’19
Spent1 $20B
Earned2 $4B

The money arrives faster than the evidence: $12.6B went into quantum companies in 2025, six times the year before; IBM has pledged $10B over five years; Washington is taking equity stakes; governments have committed $54B more, kept outside the corporate ledger here. Industry revenue crossed $1B a year for the first time in 2025 — and no machine has yet solved a commercially useful problem faster than a classical one.

RotD

Washington signs $2B of letters of intent with nine quantum firms, taking equity stakes — the house buys chips. ...

More RotD …

Revenue, mind — not profit. The pure-plays lost about $1B in 2025 on $190M of combined revenue; Quantinuum then floated at $14B in June, some 450 times sales. AI at least gets to argue about margins. Quantum’s gap sits earlier in the pipeline: nothing it sells yet beats the incumbent. Advantage remains, as it has since 2019, a few years out.

CompanyRevenueSpendProfit / (Loss)1 Year Ago
IBM$1.1B booked since ’17~$2B/yr pledgedn/dn/d
Googlenone disclosed~$0.5B/yr est(~$0.5B) estn/d
Microsoftbundled (Azure)~$0.4B/yr est(~$0.4B) estn/d
AWSbundled (Braket)~$0.3B/yr est(~$0.3B) estn/d
IonQ$130M~$320M($510M)($332M)
Quantinuum$31M~$220M($193M)($144M)
D-Wave$25M~$121M($85M) adj($76M) adj
Rigetti$7M~$92M($216M)($201M)

FY2025 figures. Pure-play GAAP losses swing on non-cash warrant revaluations — D-Wave shown adjusted; the cash leaves either way. Hyperscalers don’t report quantum P&L, so those rows are estimates.

1 Spent — Cumulative operating burn and R&D at pure-play quantum companies (IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave, Quantinuum, PsiQuantum, and others with disclosed figures) plus the reported/estimated quantum divisions of the hyperscalers (IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel). Where a hyperscaler does not separately report quantum spend, an analyst estimate is used. Government grants and national-lab funding are tracked separately in the discussion and not included here. Figures run from Google’s quantum supremacy claim (October 2019) to the date shown.

2 Earned — Cumulative quantum-attributable revenue across the same companies — cloud access to quantum hardware, on-premise system sales, algorithm and consulting services, and government contracts recognised as revenue. Not all companies separately report quantum revenue; figures are estimated from earnings calls and analyst disclosures, and are intentionally conservative: revenue is counted only where the quantum contribution can be reasonably isolated.