If the AI trade is a bubble, quantum computing stocks might be the bubble’s overcaffeinated younger sibling. The valuations are genuinely hard to type with a straight face — and the people who actually understand the physics are, politely, not promising you a payout this decade.
The valuations
As of late May 2026, per The Motley Fool, IonQ carried a market cap north of $21 billion on about $187 million of trailing revenue — a price-to-sales ratio around 109. Rigetti and D-Wave were reportedly trading at P/S ratios of roughly 836 and 791. For context, a P/S of 30 for a company at the front of a genuine megatrend has historically proven hard to sustain. These are three to twenty-eight times that. Nasdaq contributors have been blunt about what usually follows numbers like these.
The insiders are voting with their wallets
The tell that’s harder to spin: the people who run these companies are net sellers. Across the pure-play quantum names, insiders have sold roughly $931 million more stock than they’ve bought since 2021. D-Wave’s cumulative insider buying reportedly tallies under $2,000. Rigetti, per the same reporting, doesn’t have a single recorded insider purchase. When the folks with the most information and the most upside are consistently cashing out, that’s data.
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What the credible voices actually say
Two names worth more than a hundred hype threads. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said at CES in January 2025 that “very useful” quantum computers were probably 15 to 30 years away — a single sentence that vaporized ~39% of IonQ and ~45% of Rigetti in a day (he later softened it toward an “inflection point,” which tells you how much these stocks move on vibes). And quantum-complexity theorist Scott Aaronson, about as far from a hype-man as the field produces, has written thoughtfully about the gap between real, exciting progress and the stock-market fantasy being sold on top of it.
The nuance that keeps it honest
Here’s what the bears sometimes skip: the underlying science had a genuinely big 2026. Error-correction crossed real thresholds — Google’s Quantum AI milestones, Microsoft’s work with Atom Computing, and D-Wave’s June roadmap targeting 100 logical qubits by 2032. Fault-tolerant quantum computing is shifting from physics problem to engineering problem. That’s real. It’s also, by the vendors’ own roadmaps, most of a decade out — which is a very awkward timeline to underwrite a 800x sales multiple against.
Not investment advice. Valuations and P/S figures cited are as reported on the dates linked; do your own homework before acting.