D-Wave Quantum (NYSE:QBTS), which builds both annealing and gate-model quantum computers, rose 8.57% premarket after AT&T NYSE:T signed an agreement to expand its use of the company's technology across network operations. AT&T will fold the annealing systems into the tools behind its agentic AI software, which the carrier says cut customer downtime by 12 million hours in 2025.
In early testing, AT&T took a network optimization workload that had been running for roughly an hour and brought it under 15 seconds. From there the carrier plans to look at outage detection and response, technician routing, network build planning and traffic management. "D-Wave's annealing quantum computing technology gives us a new way to approach optimization," said Lucus Haugen, director of data science in AT&T's chief data office.
AT&T is separately evaluating D-Wave's forthcoming gate-model systems for quantum security and quantum communications. Neither company disclosed financial terms.