After Receiving $100 Million in Government Funding, Are Rigetti Computing and D-Wave Quantum the Best Quantum Computing Stocks?

The U.S. government will invest up to $100 million each in Rigetti and D-Wave, but the article frames this as a broad bet on competing quantum approaches rather than validation of either stock. Rigetti is still struggling with accuracy, missing its 99.5% target with 99.1% 2-qubit gate fidelity and failing to advance in DARPA’s QBI, while D-Wave’s annealing business is more mature but its gate-based ambitions remain unproven. Overall, both remain highly speculative, with the author favoring trapped-ion names like IonQ and Quantinuum due to superior fidelity metrics.

Analysis

The government stake is less a blanket endorsement of quantum and more a signal that the policy backstop is being used to preserve optionality across architectures. That matters for relative performance: capital is likely to migrate toward the names that can credibly convert subsidy into technical milestones, while the weakest balance-sheet stories become “prove it” vehicles and get punished on any missed gating event. In practice, that should keep dispersion high across the group rather than lift the whole basket.

RGTI looks tactically the most vulnerable because its core issue is not market awareness but execution risk: fidelity gaps are not cosmetic, they delay error-correction roadmaps and push commercialization farther right. If progress stalls for another 1-2 quarters, the market may start treating the name like a funded science project rather than an emerging platform, which compresses multiple and raises dilution risk. QBTS has a different problem: it can point to real commercial activity, but the strategic pivot into gate-model creates a credibility gap until there are independent technical milestones.

The cleaner relative winner remains IONQ on an accuracy basis. In quantum, small fidelity advantages compound nonlinearly because they reduce the overhead required for error correction, which can shorten the path to economically useful machines by years, not months. That makes the current policy flow more useful as a sentiment tailwind for IONQ than as fundamental validation for the broader speculative set.

The contrarian setup is that government capital may actually cap downside in the weakest names while giving traders an excuse to buy volatility instead of stock. So the better expression is relative value: own the highest-quality architecture and fade the less credible execution stories into strength. If the market starts rewarding headline funding over milestone delivery, that usually creates a short window for pair trades before fundamentals reassert themselves.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long IONQ / short RGTI as a 3-6 month relative-value pair: thesis is that accuracy leadership should re-rate faster than government-funded but technically behind peers; tighten the short if RGTI prints a credible fidelity step-up or major enterprise contract.
• Long IONQ vs QBTS on a 1-2 quarter horizon: QBTS has commercial traction, but the market is likely to demand proof that the gate-model transition is more than narrative; use QBTS strength as a hedge against sector beta.
• Avoid outright long RGTI until the next technical milestone: risk/reward is poor because any missed fidelity target or delayed benchmark update can trigger another leg down and possible dilution over the next 6-12 months.
• Use call spreads on IONQ rather than stock for event-driven upside over the next 90 days: the policy overhang supports sentiment, but the real upside comes from confirmation of technical leadership, so structure for asymmetric upside with defined premium.
• If you want sector exposure, prefer a basket long of IONQ and short QBTS/RGTI rather than long the whole quantum group: this isolates the architecture-quality premium and reduces the chance of being trapped in policy-driven but fundamental-empty rallies.