D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) has completed its acquisition of Quantum Circuits Inc., a move designed to transform the company into the world’s only “dual-platform” quantum provider. The transaction, valued at approximately $550 million (consisting of $300 million in common stock and $250 million in cash), integrates D-Wave’s market-leading annealing technology with Quantum Circuits’ specialized superconducting gate-model hardware. The acquisition effectively consolidates a full-stack quantum offering under one roof, with D-Wave intending to make an initial gate-model system generally available as early as 2026.
The core technical driver of the deal is Quantum Circuits’ dual-rail qubit technology, which features hardware-integrated error detection. Unlike conventional superconducting qubits that are highly sensitive to energy relaxation (T₁) errors, dual-rail qubits encode information in the subspace of two microwave resonators. This architecture converts energy loss into detectable “erasure” errors—heralded leakage states that can be identified without destroying the underlying quantum information. This “correct-first” approach is projected to reduce the physical qubit overhead required for fault-tolerant systems by up to 200 times, allowing D-Wave to bypass the massive redundancy requirements that challenge many other gate-model scaling roadmaps.
Strategically, the acquisition brings Dr. Rob Schoelkopf, a Yale professor and pioneer of the transmon qubit and circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED), into D-Wave as Chief Scientist. D-Wave will establish a new research and development center in New Haven, Connecticut, specifically to focus on the gate-model program. The company’s near-term roadmap includes a 49-qubit dual-rail system planned for release alongside its existing Advantage annealing platform. By offering both annealing for optimization and gate-model for chemistry and simulation, D-Wave aims to address the full spectrum of industrial and scientific computational challenges.
Further details on the integrated product roadmap and the rollout of the gate-model cloud service will be presented at the Qubits 2026 user conference, scheduled for January 27–28 in Boca Raton, Florida. Read the official press release from D-Wave here and explore technical specifications of the dual-rail qubit here.
January 20, 2026
