D-Wave Quantum Soars as AT&T Expands Quantum Computing Partnership

D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) stock surged 7.1% in premarket trading after the company announced an expanded partnership with AT&T to deploy annealing quantum computing across new areas of its network operations.

The deal builds on an existing collaboration where D-Wave's technology was used in a limited capacity, including one application that reduced a network optimization task from one hour to under 15 seconds.

AT&T will now use the technology for outage detection and traffic management, with the company projecting it could save customers around 12 million hours of downtime.

The news gave the broader quantum sector a lift, with other stocks like IonQ (IONQ), Rigetti Computing (RGTI), and Quantinuum (QNT) also rising.