If you put $10,000 into Apple at the

start of the smartphone era, you'd have

over half a million dollars today. If

you invested that money in Nvidia when

Chat GPT started the AI era just three

years ago, you'd already have over a

hundred grand. Well, three big

breakthroughs just kicked off the

quantum computing era, and it's already

something we can invest in. My name is

Alex, and I spent eight years as an

electrical engineer and AI researcher at

MIT, and I've never seen back-to-back

breakthroughs this big. So, let me show

you what just happened and how I'm

investing in it. Your time is valuable,

so let's get right into it. I want to

start this video in an interesting

place, CES 2025, the Consumer

Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I was

there in person when during a press Q&A

session, Jensen Huang told the world

that useful quantum computers were 15 to

30 years away. The market reaction was

instant and it was brutal. IonQ dropped

by about 39% in one day, Rigetti fell by

45% and D-Wave crashed by 36%. One

sentence from one CEO cratered an entire

class of stocks. And then, something

strange happened. Two months later, when

I was at Nvidia GTC 2025, I saw Jensen

change his tune. He said that quantum

computing was closer than he thought,

and he hosted the first ever Nvidia

Quantum Day. Three months after that in

Paris, he said that quantum was reaching

an inflection point and that it was

going to solve some real problems in the

coming years. Those comments ended up

fueling the massive bubble in quantum

computing stocks late last year. That

bubble was so big that I decided not to

cover quantum at all. Everything was

already priced to perfection, but now

the bubble is behind us and something

big just happened. Just two weeks ago,

Nvidia shipped an open-source software

stack called Icing, which figures out

how to split a problem between GPUs and

quantum computers to get the best of

both worlds, and they put IonQ on the

short list of early adopters. In the 10

years that I've been investing in

Nvidia, I've never seen Jensen change

his stance on any technology so fast,

but now I understand why. On the same

day that Nvidia shipped IonQ announced

the first photonic interconnect between

two separate commercial quantum

processors.

In English, that means that IonQ linked

two quantum chips together and got them

to act like one, kind of like how

Nvidia's black GPUs get two compute dies

to act like a single chip. That same

day, DARPA picked IonQ for a two-year

program called HARQ, effectively giving

them federal funding to scale their

quantum systems. And just 1 week before

that, Rigetti made the first 100-plus

qubit quantum computer generally

available on AWS, which means you can

now rent a state-of-the-art quantum

computer the same way you'd rent a

regular server. So, in just 1 week,

Nvidia released software to control

quantum computers along with GPUs, IonQ

figured out how to connect theirs

together, and Rigetti put theirs on the

cloud. Quantum computing isn't science

fiction anymore. It's an entire market

sector that's finally worth investing

in. And I'm not here to keep you

hostage. So, here are the three stocks

I'm going to use to explain the market.

IonQ, ticker symbol IONQ, which uses

photons to scale beyond single quantum

chips. Rigetti Computing, ticker symbol

RGTI, which has a 128 qubit processor

you can already rent on AWS. And D-Wave,

ticker symbol QBTS, a quantum company

already solving big problems for even

bigger customers. And of course, which

of these three stocks I think is the

best buy right now. I want to make the

best use of your time. So, let's start

with what these companies have in

common. And uh what the heck a quantum

computer even is. In classical

computing, a bit can either be a zero or

a one, Just like a coin can either be

heads or tails. That's it. Every piece

of software you've ever used, every app

on your phone, every AI model, every

spreadsheet runs on those two binary

numbers, one or zero, heads or tails,

flipped billions of times every second.

A qubit is like a weighted coin where

you can choose the weight. Before you

flip it, it has some probability of

heads and tails at the same time. You

only know which way it landed once you

flip the coin and you look at it.

So, until you see the result by

measuring a qubit, it still has the

probabilities of both one and zero,

heads and tails. Now, take a bunch of

those quantum coins and link them all

together so that when you check one, you

instantly know how all the other coins

could land. They follow a shared pattern

instead of flipping independently.

That's quantum entanglement, or at least

it's my best attempt at understanding

it. And when you entangle a system of

qubits together, the math gets wild

really fast. A single qubit has two

possible states, zero or one, heads or

tails. A system of two qubits has four

states, 00, 01, 10, or 11. A system of

three qubits has eight states. Eight is

two to the third power. That means a

system of 300 entangled qubits has two

raised to the 300 different possible

states, which is more possibilities than

there are atoms in the observable

universe. That's why quantum computers

are exponentially more powerful than

classical ones, at least for certain

kinds of problems, like optimization,

simulation, cryptography, and certain

kinds of machine learning. But there's a

catch. Qubits are insanely fragile, and

things like heat, vibration, or even a

single stray photon can knock them out

of their shared pattern, turning them

back into regular ones and zeros. That's

called decoherence. Keeping a qubit

stable long enough to actually run a

useful calculation is the entire name of

the game, and every company in this

video is making a different massive bet

on the best way to do it. At the start

of this video, I pointed out that Apple

and Nvidia made investors rich by being

the cornerstone companies of the mobile

and AI computing eras. Well, the global

quantum computing market is expected to

more than 20x in size over the next 10

years and could become a $40 billion

market by 2035. That's almost as fast as

the growth of the AI market itself.

According to Market US, the global

artificial intelligence market is

expected to almost 19x in size over the

next 9 years, which is a compound annual

growth rate of 38.5%

through 2034. But, many of the companies

building next-generation AI applications

are not publicly traded. Think about the

'90s and early 2000s. Companies like

Amazon and Google went public very early

in their growth cycle. But today,

they're waiting an average of 10 years

or longer to go public. That means

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right. So, the quantum computing market

is expected to grow at a 36% compound

annual growth rate for the next decade,

over two times faster growth than the

S&P 500. And that's before Nvidia

started building infrastructure to

support it, which will obviously

increase adoption. And that brings us to

Nvidia themselves. Nvidia isn't building

a quantum chip. They're building the

infrastructure between everyone else's

quantum chips and their own GPUs. Late

last year at Nvidia's GTC DC conference,

they announced something called NVLink,

a super fast connection that lets GPUs

send instructions and read results in

just a few millionths of a second.

That's fast enough for GPUs to watch the

qubits, correct their errors, and adjust

things along the fly before the system

decoheres. And then, just a couple weeks

ago, they released Ising. That's an

open-source AI toolkit that helps

quantum chips fix their own errors in

real time. Ising also speeds up quantum

calibration, which is a process that

took days, but now takes just hours. As

an investor, this made one thing crystal

clear for me. Nvidia doesn't think

quantum computers are going to replace

GPUs, or else they obviously wouldn't

build systems to support them. Instead,

they see quantum computers plugging into

our current data center infrastructure

to help with very specific kinds of

workloads. So, the future will be about

hybrid computing, a mix of CPUs, GPUs,

and QPU all working together. But even

if that happens, these companies still

have some serious risks that you need to

know about. First, their revenues are

still small. IonQ is the only one over a

hundred million dollars in revenue.

Rigetti made just seven million dollars

last fiscal year, and D-Wave made around

25 million. That's why their stocks can

move by 30, 40, even 50% in a single day

in either direction, just like we saw

over the last year. Second, they have

serious customer concentration. Most of

their money today comes from government

and defense contractors, so any budget

cuts would hit all three at once. And

third, like I'm about to explain, well,

explain, all three companies have

fundamentally different approaches to

quantum computing. That means today's

winners could be tomorrow's losers, and

you need to know that going in. All

right, IonQ is the current frontrunner

in public quantum hardware. If I had to

boil them down to a single sentence,

IonQ is the closest thing to being the

Nvidia of quantum computing, if their

approach ends up being the right way to

go. IonQ uses something called trapped

ion systems, which uses charged atoms as

the qubits, the coins we talked about

before. It holds them in place with

electromagnetic fields, and it controls

them with lasers. This trapped ion

approach gives IonQ some of the highest

quality qubits in the industry. They run

slower, but they also have fewer errors,

which means you can run them longer

before the decoherence kicks in. And

importantly, trapped ion systems are the

easiest kinds to network multiple chips

together. Here's why that matters. The

hard part about scaling quantum

computers is that a single chip tops out

at a few hundred qubits, but it takes

tens of thousands of qubits to do things

like certain kinds of cryptography,

simulate real chemistry, and optimize

global supply chains. So, how do you

scale from 100 to 10,000? You can try to

build one giant chip, but nobody's

figured out how to do that. Or, you can

network multiple chips together. That's

exactly what IonQ just did last week,

when they announced the first photonic

interconnect between two quantum

processors. Proving this could even be

done is a serious milestone the entire

industry has been chasing since the

1990s. The path from 100 qubits to

10,000 is no longer science fiction.

It's just a matter of time, money, and

engineering. On the same exact day,

DARPA added them to a program called

HARQ, Harnessing Quantum Computing at

Scale, which basically means the US

Department of Defense is willing to bet

real money on IonQ's solutions. And

speaking of money, IonQ reported $62

million in revenue last quarter, which

is up a massive 429%

year-over-year. They made $130 million

for the full year, which is more than

triple their year before, making them

the only public quantum computing

company to cross the $100 million mark.

But the special thing about IonQ isn't

just their revenue, it's their backlog,

which grew to about $370 million, or

almost three times their last year's

revenue. And they're guiding for $235

million this year, which would imply

around 80% revenue growth for 2026. One

thing to be careful with, they reported

a net income of $754 million, but that

number was driven by a non-cash warrant

reevaluation gain of $950 million. That

means they actually had an operating

loss for the quarter, and their

management actually expects larger

losses in 2026 as they keep investing in

their systems. On the balance sheet,

IonQ has roughly $3.3 billion in cash

and short-term investments. That's a

massive war chest for a company this

small, and exactly what you want to

offset so much execution risk. For

investors, the takeaway here is simple.

IonQ has the biggest backlog and the

strongest balance sheet in quantum

computing, but you're still betting on

an unprofitable, highly volatile stock

where the core technology has real risks

and the market is still very small.

That's what I mean when I say get in

early, but getting in early is a

double-edged sword. All right, let's

talk about Rigetti Computing next. If

Jensen Huang is right that quantum

computers will work with GPUs instead of

replacing them, then Rigetti is set up

to win big. It's already plugged

directly into Nvidia's NVQ link and

CUDA-Q stack for hybrid workloads. So,

any enterprise that wants Nvidia's stack

and quantum computing will be running on

Rigetti's hardware. Quantum computers

from Google, IBM, and Rigetti all rely

on superconducting systems, which use

tiny electrical circuits that are cooled

so close to absolute zero that they

behave like artificial atoms. They run

around 4,000 times faster than the

trapped ion qubits from IonQ, but their

errors are so much harder to control

that they only end up being something

like 10 times faster in practice. Those

errors also make superconducting systems

much harder to scale, but unlike IBM or

Google, Rigetti is the only way to

invest directly in this technology

without investing in all the other, much

bigger business units as well. Rigetti

also has the first 100-plus qubit

processor available on AWS. AWS is the

default cloud computing infrastructure

for millions of developers around the

world, and they all just got access to

Rigetti's quantum computer. Now, here's

where Rigetti looks very different from

a company like IonQ. Their Q4 2025

revenue was just $1.9 million,

and it was down 18% year-over-year.

Their full-year 2025 revenue was just

$7.1 million.

So, Rigetti is still a pre-commercial

company, and valuing them based on

revenue won't get you very far. Instead,

I'm watching their cash position and

their milestones. Are they increasing

the number of qubits in their systems?

Are more AWS customers using their

chips? And are they getting more

partnerships with hyperscalers in

general? With government agencies? And

are they getting more integrated with

Nvidia? Rigetti finished the year with

about $590 million in cash, and they're

burning about $20 million a quarter.

That means they have about 30 quarters

of cash runway, or about 7.5 years. So,

don't mistake their lack of revenue for

a lack of funding. And that brings us to

D-Wave, the only company with a

commercial product that customers

actually pay for today, not pilots and

not research partnerships. Quantum

annealing, like the kind in D-Wave's

Advantage line of systems, isn't really

a general-purpose computer. It's a

specialized machine built to solve

optimization problems like scheduling,

routing, and materials design. The

important thing for investors to know

about this one is that companies like

Volkswagen, Google, NASA, and Lockheed

Martin already pay to run workloads on

D-Wave's systems today. And in January

of this year, D-Wave closed a $550

million acquisition of Quantum Circuits

Inc., which gives them a gate-based

quantum platform on top of their

existing annealing business. Gate-based

superconducting is more of a

general-purpose quantum computer, which

complements D-Wave's more specialized

quantum annealing systems. For

investors, that means that D-Wave has

two different quantum architectures

under one roof. So, D-Wave doesn't have

to win the war to survive it. They only

need one of them to work out long-term.

That optionality is the unique thing

about D-Wave. Last quarter, D-Wave's

revenue came in at $2.8 million,

up 19% year-over-year. But their

business is still spiky and driven by

big deals. Full year 2025 revenue came

in at $24.6 million, which was actually

up 179%

year-over-year. In January and February

of this year alone, they reported $32.8

million in new bookings, already more

than their entire 2025 revenue in just 2

months. On April 14th at the Semaphore

World Economic Summit, D-Wave's CEO said

that Nvidia should be shaking in their

boots when it comes to quantum. That

line landed on the same day that Nvidia

launched Ising, and D-Wave stock

skyrocketed by around 50% that week.

D-Wave has around $630 million on their

balance sheet, and that's after

acquiring Quantum Circuits Inc. They're

currently burning around $70 million a

year, which gives them almost a 9-year

cash runway. So, as an investor, I like

that D-Wave has all the funding they

need until they can become profitable

themselves. All right, before we can

decide which of these three stocks is

the best buy right now, here's a table

summarizing everything I covered. As you

read through it, just keep a few things

in mind. I built this table myself by

pulling numbers from each company's

latest earnings call, and I tried to

make each row as apples-to-apples as

possible. But, IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave

all have different customers, different

contract lengths, and fundamentally

different approaches to quantum

computing. So, take this table as a good

way to compare them, but not as official

audited numbers. And now that we have

all that context, we can answer the big

question: Which quantum computing

company is the best investment right

now? And if you feel I've earned it,

consider hitting the like button and

subscribing to the channel. That really

helps me out, and it lets me know to

make more content like this. Thanks.

Now, let's talk about IonQ, Rigetti, and

D-Wave stock. IonQ is the clear leader

of the quantum computing pack. Their

revenue grew by 428%

year-over-year. They have a backlog of

$370 million,

and they're the only public company to

link two commercial quantum computing

chips together. So, if you're the kind

of growth investor who waits for a

company to prove its product-market fit

at scale before risking your own money,

IonQ is probably for you. If you believe

that the future of quantum computing

isn't overtaking CPUs and GPUs, but

working alongside them, then Rigetti is

the company connected to Nvidia's stack

with NVQ link and CUDA-Q. And they

already have a quantum processor that

any AWS customer can rent. Just

remember, this is the smallest company

with the smallest revenue and cash

position of the three. So, if you can

stomach some execution risk and

volatility in exchange for a shot at

owning Nvidia's quantum future, Rigetti

may be the stock for you. And D-Wave is

for investors who like having their cake

and eating it, too. They already have

paying customers today, and you get

exposure to two different quantum

architectures instead of betting on one,

quantum annealing and the gate-based

superconducting architecture from their

quantum circuits acquisition. D-Wave is

growing almost as fast as IonQ, but from

a much smaller base, which isn't that

big of a deal since they already have

enough cash to last for almost nine

years. Personally, I want to own all

three stocks for one simple reason. All

three companies have fundamentally

different approaches to building quantum

computers at scale, and I don't know

enough about the space to reliably pick

a winner. So, this is one of those times

where I'd rather own the entire market

than bet on a single stock. If I had to

pick a winner based purely on market cap

versus revenue, backlog, and growth

potential, I'd pick IonQ because they're

already over $100 million in annual

revenue, they have a $370 million

backlog, and they're still growing by

over 200% per year. So, to me, they have

the best risk-to-reward ratio of the

three. But, one thing's for sure,

quantum computing is quickly moving from

science fiction to a future worth

investing in. Let me know which stock

you're buying below. All three companies

report earnings in early May. So, let me

know if you want me to follow up with a

deep dive video on any one of them. And

if you want to see more science behind

the stocks, check out this video next.

Either way, thanks for watching and

until next time, this is ticker symbol

U. My name is Alex reminding you that

the best investment you can make

is in you.