IBM says it has booked $1 billion worth of cumulative quantum business.
The revelation was made by the company in comments to CNBC. It is not clear when IBM started recording revenues to reach this figure.
The revelation followed the release of the company’s Q4 2024 results, which saw Big Blue exceed Wall Street expectations and post quarterly revenue of $17.6 billion, bringing the year’s revenue to $62.8bn overall. However, IBM does not provide a breakdown of figures for its quantum business in earnings reports, meaning it’s not possible to know just how much quarterly revenue the technology is driving for the company.
In Q3 2024, publicly traded quantum computing companies IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave posted combined revenues of less than $20 million. If you were to divide IBM’s $1bn figure equally over 34 quarters – roughly the number of reporting quarters since the company launched its first quantum product – it would equal approximately $29.4m.
DCD has contacted IBM to ask for more information about how the $1bn figure was reached.
Update: In response, IBM directed DCD to its 2025 Investor Day presentation, during which Jay Gambetta, VP of quantum, IBM fellow, provided more detail about the company's current and forward-looking quantum strategy.
The presentation clarified that the reporting window relating to the $1bn figure was Q1 2017 - Q4 2024, making average quarterly quantum revenue ~$31.3m.
However, while CNBC reported that IBM had booked $1bn of cumulative quantum business, the Investor Day presentation states: "IBM Quantum is approaching $1 billion of signings since inception (Q1 2017)."
A brief history of IBM Quantum
IBM launched its first quantum offering in May 2016, a five-qubit cloud-based quantum computing service that was known at the time as IBM Quantum Experience.
The following year, the company made an additional 16-qubit processor available on the platform, announcing in 2018 that there were more than 80,000 users of the IBM Quantum Experience, who have collectively run more than three million experiments.
Today the company hosts around a dozen quantum computers at its own data centers in New York and Germany for its quantum cloud service.
In addition to its cloud-based quantum offerings, IBM’s quantum portfolio also includes a commercial quantum computer dubbed IBM Quantum System One. Powered by a 127-qubit IBM Quantum ‘Eagle’ processor, the system is kept at an operating temperature of 0.015 Kelvin to enable the qubits to maintain their quantum state. The quantum processor chip, which holds the qubits and performs the calculations, is positioned towards the bottom of the chandelier.
Since its launch in 2019, IBM has shipped five on-premise machines to customers, with recipients including South Korea’s Yonsei University, the University of Tokyo, and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
In December 2023, IBM unveiled a host of new quantum hardware and software products, including a 133 fixed-frequency qubit processor dubbed IBM Quantum Heron and IBM Quantum System Two, the company’s first modular quantum computer.
In May 2024, the company announced it would be deploying an IBM Quantum System Two quantum computer at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan.
Update: IBM states during its Investor Day presentation that it has 13 utility-scale quantum computers (100+ qubits) operational in Poughkeepsie, NY; its German data center; and in client locations around the world.
In total, the company claims to have deployed just shy of 80 quantum systems since 2016, more than the rest of the world combined, according to publicly available data cited by IBM.
