AT&T expands its D-Wave deal after a 240x speedup — quantum annealing goes into production

AT&T signed an agreement to expand its use of D-Wave's annealing quantum computing across network operations, after an initial application cut a network-optimization workload from roughly an hour to under 15 seconds — a 240x speedup. AT&T plans to extend the technology to outage detection and response, technician routing, network build planning and traffic management, layering the annealer into the tools already powering its agentic AI. D-Wave shares jumped more than 20% on the news.

Why it matters

This is the other half of the same-day quantum story, and the more commercially concrete one. Where IBM claimed a verifiable advantage in physics simulation, D-Wave has a Fortune-15 carrier paying to run a real, recurring operational workload 240x faster — annealing, a narrower and more mature approach than gate-model machines, doing production work now rather than promising fault-tolerance later. For a stock that had swung on hype-versus-substance amid the broader quantum selloff, a named enterprise expanding usage is the kind of revenue-adjacent proof point the sector has been short on. The caveat: annealing suits specific optimization problems and isn't a universal quantum computer, so this is a real but bounded win — the question is how many more AT&T-shaped workloads exist.

What to watch

Whether the expanded AT&T use converts into disclosed recurring revenue, other enterprises adopting annealing for optimization, and D-Wave's Thursday earnings for how commercial traction shows up in the numbers.