D-Wave Quantum shares climbed about 5% in premarket trading to roughly $18.47 after CGI agreed to sell the company's Advantage2 quantum systems and hybrid solvers to its enterprise clients in logistics, transportation and retail. The deal gives D-Wave a distribution channel of 94,000 CGI employees but no disclosed contract value, leaving investors to weigh it against $3.1 million of quarterly revenue and a $53.3 million operating loss.
A consulting channel of 94,000 employees and more than 150 technology partners is now open to D-Wave Quantum Inc., whose stock gained roughly 5% to about $18.47 before the opening bell after CGI Inc. agreed to sell the company's annealing quantum systems to its enterprise clients.
"Quantum computing's business value is no longer theoretical," Lorenzo Martinelli, chief revenue officer at D-Wave, said. "D-Wave customers are using annealing quantum computing today to improve operations and generate tangible results on problems that challenge legacy systems."
The partnership, announced Sept. 23 from Montréal, commits CGI to integrate D-Wave's Advantage2 quantum computer and its hybrid solvers into advanced technology services for logistics, transportation and retail clients. Target workloads include train scheduling and rail yard operations, energy grid optimization, asset maintenance scheduling, supply chain planning and delivery routing. CGI and D-Wave said they will co-develop the use cases, building on more than a year of joint work. Neither company disclosed contract value, guaranteed revenue or a revenue-sharing structure.
The commercial question is whether a distribution agreement can close a gap that D-Wave's own bookings have not. First-half 2026 bookings reached $35.5 million, up more than 1,120% from a year earlier, and remaining performance obligations climbed 668% to $40.7 million. Revenue has not followed: second-quarter sales were $3.1 million, essentially flat year over year, against a $53.3 million operating loss and $28.2 million of research and development spending. More than 100 customers contributed revenue in the first six months, which implies an average of roughly $300,000 per account — a figure that shows how early the deployments remain.
D-Wave is the only listed pure-play selling both annealing and gate-model systems, and the CGI deal leans entirely on the annealing side. Annealing machines are built to solve optimization problems — finding the best route, schedule or allocation among many combinations — rather than running general-purpose circuits. That distinction is why D-Wave can point to production work today while rivals chase fault-tolerant hardware years out. The company has cited an AT&T engagement that cut a network optimization task from about an hour to under 15 seconds, though D-Wave has not published the test conditions behind that comparison.
The competitive set is crowded and better capitalized in places. IonQ Inc. and Rigetti Computing Inc. build gate-model systems aimed at broader computational problems, while International Business Machines Corp. and Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., run their own quantum programs with far larger research budgets. D-Wave's differentiation is commercial timing, not raw scale — and CGI's roughly 94,000 consultants give it a channel those competitors have not matched with a systems integrator of comparable size.
CGI's own stake is smaller. The firm, which trades in New York and Toronto, framed the deal as an extension of existing technology services rather than a new business line, and disclosed no incremental investment. For a consultancy with a broad client roster, quantum optimization is a differentiator to sell alongside conventional analytics, not a revenue driver in itself.
D-Wave ended June with about $546 million in liquidity and has secured an arrangement for up to $100 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Commerce, enough to fund operations for several years at the current burn rate. The risk is dilution: persistent operating losses mean further financing rounds remain likely, and the company must convert bookings into recognized revenue before that runway narrows.
The stock's move on the announcement was modest relative to its history, which suggests investors treated the CGI tie-up as incremental rather than decisive. Quantum names broadly have traded on headline flow into the Quantum World Congress, where investors are watching for government contracts, research partnerships and technology roadmaps. IonQ and Rigetti remain the closest read-throughs for any sector-wide re-rating.
The next hard test is D-Wave's third-quarter report, which will show whether CGI-channel deals appear in bookings and whether revenue breaks out of the $3 million range. Until then, the partnership is a distribution win with an undisclosed price tag.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
