New York, Jan 9, 2026, 09:05 EST — Premarket
D-Wave Quantum Inc (QBTS) shares slid about 3.1% to $29.28 in premarket trading on Friday as investors digested the company’s agreement to buy Quantum Circuits in a $550 million cash-and-stock deal. The stock component will be based on a 10-day volume-weighted average price, with a collar of $22.30 to $39.03 per share, and the deal can be terminated if it isn’t completed by April 6, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The deal is notable because it takes D-Wave further into gate-model quantum computing, the “circuit” approach designed to run a wide range of algorithms. D-Wave is best known for quantum annealing, a more specialised method focused on optimisation problems.
That shift is what traders are paying for right now: a cleaner path from lab work to something that can be sold, faster, in a sector that’s long traded on milestones and timelines more than steady profits. The deal’s cash component and the stock collar push funding and dilution back to the forefront.
D-Wave said it expects the acquisition to close in late January, subject to conditions including U.S. antitrust review, and pitched it as a way to speed up its gate-model roadmap. Chief Executive Alan Baratz said that meant “bringing gate-model products and services to market in 2026,” while Quantum Circuits co-founder and chief scientist Rob Schoelkopf said “Fault-tolerant error-corrected quantum computing is within our reach.” (D-Wave Quantum)
“Error correction” is industry shorthand for methods designed to spot and repair mistakes that creep in when qubits — the basic units of quantum processors — get hit by noise. It’s one of the main obstacles to turning experimental machines into dependable tools.
Rivals including IonQ and Rigetti are also selling routes to gate-model systems, even as big tech groups bankroll their own architectures. For D-Wave, it comes down to whether it can juggle two tracks — annealing for near-term commercial work and gate-model for a broader future — without spreading capital and engineers too thin.
But the setup works both ways. If the shares slide toward the collar floor before closing, the company may have to issue more stock to hit the $300 million value, and any holdup in regulatory sign-off could push the timeline out.
Next up for investors: what D-Wave rolls out at its Qubits 2026 conference in Boca Raton, Florida, on Jan. 27-28, and whether the company can still stick to that late-January close.
