D-Wave Buying Spree: Will These Firms Be Potential Targets?

Key Points

• With reserves of $819 million as of the end of the second quarter, D-Wave Quantum has cash to burn. The question is, how will the company spend its money?
• Executives have suggested that M&A deals may be on the horizon, with information potentially emerging by the end of the year.
• D-Wave could use acquisitions to enhance its preexisting technology, expand into new areas, or provide ready-made, user-friendly tools to increase its customer base and spending, among other approaches.

Investors shrugged after quantum computing firm D-Wave Quantum Inc. NYSE: QBTS provided mixed results in its latest earnings report in August 2025. Still, despite dipping by 12% in the last month, shares of the popular tech name are up 72% year-to-date (YTD). Some positive sentiment may be due to investors digging deeper beyond the company's ongoing pursuit of consistent profitability for other signs of success. 

A standout figure from the latest earnings report—a record $819 million in cash reserves at the end of the quarter—points to significant potential for D-Wave to engage in additional share repurchases or, perhaps even better, a buying spree.

Executives at the firm have suggested that an acquisition strategy is taking shape already, although they have been tight-lipped about potential targets D-Wave may have in mind. The company has indicated, however, that it may announce acquisitions as early as the end of 2025.

Given D-Wave's significant cash holdings and appetite for deals that could boost its product development or R&D efforts, investors might speculate about some potential acquisition targets in the works.

Below we've highlighted a few, exploring how they might benefit D-Wave at this stage in its development.

Bluefors: A Key Infrastructure Provider in the Cryogenics Space

D-Wave's technological lead in cryogenic packaging—a process allowing quantum computing chips to operate at extremely low temperatures necessary for some operations—is a major boon for the company. While D-Wave has focused on annealing technology in its developments, cryogenic packaging also opens the door to advances in alternative gate-model technology.

Enter Bluefors. This Finnish firm is a major producer of cryocoolers for quantum applications and has been expanding rapidly. By combining its cryogenic packaging technology with a significant infrastructure provider necessary for quantum cryogenics, D-Wave would cement its hold over this corner of the industry.

Besides locking up the cryogenic supply chain, a Bluefors acquisition would allow D-Wave to improve the performance of its leading Advantage2 quantum system while also furthering its efforts to expand its global reach.

Atom Computing: Adding Neutral-Atom Tech to the Mix

With D-Wave making concerted efforts to expand into the gate-model space—potentially at least partially in response to criticism the firm has received over perceived limitations to annealing tech—it would not be unheard of for the firm to make an acquisition, giving it yet another set of hardware capabilities.

Atom Computing could be just the company. This firm builds so-called neutral‑atom quantum systems, aiming to achieve gate-model quantum systems via a technological pathway different from D-Wave's current approach.

While an acquisition like Bluefors above could be seen as fundamentally expanding the technology D-Wave is already developing, Atom Computing would provide a different type of technological breadth. Since no one truly knows which tech will emerge as the most appealing when quantum computing becomes widely marketable, casting a wide net in this way is a potential strategy.

Multiverse Computing: Appealing to Enterprise Clients

D-Wave's revenue, which has grown rapidly in recent quarters, remains driven primarily by large-scale sales of its Advantage or Advantage2 systems to major academic institutions, governments, and similar organizations. A third acquisition strategy might prioritize seeking out means of appealing to new customers, such as enterprise clients.

Multiverse Computing is a Spanish company with a popular cloud service called Singularity ML. The platform connects clients outside of the quantum space with quantum-based tech and has a host of realized and potential applications.

As an acquisition target, Multiverse might appeal to D-Wave for its ready-made AI integration, user-friendly software, and ability to easily embed enterprise workflows, all of which could potentially draw in a new customer base.

With D-Wave's potential announcement of early M&A activity within the next several months, investors are only speculating about the potential strategy the firm might take at this point. Still, it is a useful exercise, as comparing D-Wave's actual approach against potential targets like the ones above could give key insight into how the company expects to evolve in the years to come.