Telecommunications leader AT&T (NYSE: T) has signed a commercial agreement with D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NASDAQ: QBTS) to expand its use of quantum annealing technology across its network infrastructure operations. Building on initial pilot benchmarks—where D-Wave’s quantum annealing hardware reduced a network optimization processing workload from one hour down to under 15 seconds—AT&T plans to integrate quantum optimization into its operational tooling, including its deployment of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

Integrating Quantum Annealing into Agentic AI Workflows

AT&T’s network management architecture increasingly relies on autonomous agentic AI tools to handle high-intensity operational tasks, such as outage detection, automated fault isolation, and incident mitigation. In 2025 alone, these automated systems helped reduce total customer downtime by 12 million hours. Under the expanded agreement, AT&T will layer D-Wave’s quantum annealing capabilities directly into these agentic workflows to handle combinatorial optimization bottlenecks that challenge classical compute clusters:

  • Outage Detection and Response: Accelerating real-time re-routing and power distribution decisions during unexpected physical fiber cuts or weather disruptions.
  • Field Technician Routing: Optimizing dispatch schedules and route planning for field operations across dense urban and rural service zones.
  • Traffic Management and Capacity Planning: Managing dynamic bandwidth allocation across converged 5G and fiber networks as AI-driven data demand scales up.
  • Network Build Planning: Improving physical layout calculations and capital expenditure efficiency for infrastructure expansion.

Multi-Platform Strategy and Future Gate-Model Applications

Beyond current annealing deployments via the Leap™ quantum cloud platform, AT&T is evaluating D-Wave’s accelerated gate-model development pipeline for future network security and quantum communications infrastructure. Following D-Wave’s recent acquisition of Quantum Circuits, Inc. (QCI) and its dual-rail superconducting architecture roadmap, AT&T’s Chief Data Office is exploring how future fault-tolerant systems could support quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols, network encryption, and quantum-resilient communications architectures.

Review the official corporate press release via the D-Wave Newsroom here, and examine our previous coverage of D-Wave’s Gate-Model Roadmap here and Fortune 100 Commercial Milestones here.

July 27, 2026

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