The story
Founded by Geordie Rose in 1999.1
History
D-Wave was founded by Haig Farris, Geordie Rose, Bob Wiens, and Alexandre Zagoskin in 1999. Farris taught a business course at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where Rose obtained his PhD, and Zagoskin was a postdoctoral fellow. The company name refers to their first qubit designs, which used d-wave superconductors. D-Wave operated from various locations in Vancouver, British Columbia, and laboratory spaces at UBC before moving to its current location in the neighboring suburb of Burnaby. D-Wave also has offices in Palo Alto, California and Vienna, California, USA.
D-Wave operated as an offshoot from UBC, while maintaining ties with the Department of Physics and Astronomy. It funded academic research in quantum computing, thus building a collaborative network of research scientists. The company collaborated with several universities and institutions, including UBC, IPHT Jena, Université de Sherbrooke, University of Toronto, University of Twente, Chalmers University of Technology, University of Erlangen, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These partnerships were listed on D-Wave's website until 2005. In June 2014, D-Wave announced a new quantum applications ecosystem with computational finance firm 1QB Information Technologies (1QBit) and cancer research group DNA-SEQ to focus on solving real-world problems with quantum hardware.
On May 11, 2011, D-Wave announced D-Wave One, described as "the world's first commercially available quantum computer", operating on a 128-qubit chipset using quantum annealing (a general method for finding the global minimum of a function by a process using quantum fluctuations) to solve optimization problems. The D-Wave One was built on early prototypes such as D-Wave's Orion Quantum Computer. The prototype was a 16-qubit quantum annealing processor, demonstrated on February 13, 2007, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. D-Wave demonstrated what they claimed to be a 28-qubit quantum annealing processor on November 12, 2007. The chip was fabricated at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Microdevices Lab in Pasadena, California.
In May 2013, a collaboration between NASA, Google, and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) launched a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab based on the D-Wave Two 512-qubit quantum computer that would be used for research into machine learning, among other fields of study.
On February 17, 2014, D-Wave was featured on the cover of Time magazine. In the accompanying article, Lev Grossman describes D-Wave's approach to quantum computing, the potential of the technology, and the enthusiasm of investors like Jeff Bezos, while acknowledging skepticism from some critics.
On August 20, 2015, D-Wave announced the general availability of the D-Wave 2X system, a 1000-qubit+ quantum computer. This was followed by an announcement on September 28, 2015, that it had been installed at the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA Ames Research Center.
In January 2017, D-Wave released the D-Wave 2000Q, and an open-source repository containing software tools for quantum annealers. It contains Qbsolv, which is open-source software that solves quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problems on both the company's quantum processors and classic hardware architectures.
In 2018, D-Wave released the Leap quantum cloud service.
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In 2025, D-Wave announced the sale of an Advantage system to Forschungszentrum Jülich, a research center in Germany. The system is installed at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich. Scientists at JSC, working with collaborators from other institutions, published in Nature the results of research conducted on the Advantage system simulating the dynamics of false vacuum decay. This work demonstrates that quantum computers can be used to explore complex cosmological phenomena.
Also in 2025, D-Wave published a paper in the journal Science describing a computational simulation of a magnetic material that was performed on a quantum computer dramatically faster than performing such a simulation on a traditional computer. However, some physicists questioned these claims.
In January 2026, D-Wave acquired Quantum Circuits Inc. Following which, Robert J. Schoelkopf co-founder of Quantum Circuits, was appointed D-Wave's Chief Science Officer.
On July 27, 2026, CEO Alan Baratz rang the Nasdaq Opening Bell, marking the company’s listing debut on the exchange.
2009 Google demonstration
On December 8, 2009, at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, a Google research team led by Hartmut Neven used D-Wave's processor to train a binary image classifier.
From Wikipedia’s article on D-Wave Systems, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7