Quantum computing is having another moment on Wall Street, and the numbers investors are chasing sit oddly next to the numbers the industry actually produces.
According to TradingView, two quantum computing stocks are expected to deliver more than 50% earnings growth when they report next week. Separately, The Motley Fool (fool.com) has been running pieces on which quantum names investors are accumulating, including a roundup of "3 stocks smart quantum computing investors are buying."
The scale problem comes through most clearly in another Motley Fool comparison, of IonQ against Alphabet. IonQ's revenue has tripled in two years — genuine, fast growth. Yet Alphabet still generates roughly 1,700 times more revenue per quarter than IonQ does. That gap, the piece argues, is the quantum computing bet in a nutshell: you are buying a very small business on the theory that the technology behind it eventually becomes very large.
How long that takes is the open question, and one of the industry's most prominent executives has now put a rough date on it. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna expects quantum computing to have a measurable impact on earnings by 2028-29, The American Bazaar reported. Those comments came as IBM and the startup AlgorithmQ unveiled research describing what they called a quantum computing advantage — a quantum machine, in Krishna's framing, doing things "better, faster, cheaper."
Read together, the sources describe a market pricing in a payoff that the field's own leadership places several years out. Percentage earnings growth of 50% or more sounds dramatic, but it can be produced by small absolute numbers moving modestly.
Why it matters: a lot of retail money is being committed today to a technology whose commercial payoff, by IBM's own estimate, is still years from showing up in the books.