superconducting adiabatic quantum optimization processor, mounted in a sample holder The first commercially produced D-Wave processor was a programmable,
superconducting integrated circuit with up to 128 pair-wise coupled superconducting
flux qubits. The 128-qubit processor was superseded by a 512-qubit processor in 2013. The processor is designed to implement a special-purpose
quantum annealing as opposed to being operated as a universal
gate-model quantum computer. The underlying ideas for the D-Wave approach arose from experimental results in
condensed matter physics, and particular work on quantum annealing in magnets performed by
Gabriel Aeppli,
Thomas Felix Rosenbaum, and collaborators, who had been checking the advantages, proposed by
Bikas K. Chakrabarti & collaborators, of quantum tunneling/fluctuations in the search for ground state(s) in
spin glasses. These ideas were later recast in the language of quantum computation by MIT physicists
Edward Farhi,
Seth Lloyd, Terry Orlando, and Bill Kaminsky, whose publications in 2000 and 2004 provided both a theoretical model for quantum computation that fit with the earlier work in
quantum magnetism (specifically the
adiabatic quantum computing model and quantum annealing, its finite temperature variant), and a specific enablement of that idea using superconducting
flux qubits which is a close cousin to the designs D-Wave produced. To understand the origins of much of the controversy around the D-Wave approach, it is important to note that the origins of the D-Wave approach to quantum computation arose not from the conventional
quantum information field, but from experimental
condensed matter physics.
Orion prototype On February 13, 2007, D-Wave demonstrated the Orion system, running three different applications at the
Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This marked the first public demonstration of, supposedly, a quantum computer and associated service. The first application, an example of
pattern matching, performed a search for a similar compound to a known drug within a database of
molecules. The next application computed a seating arrangement for an event subject to compatibilities and incompatibilities between guests. The last involved solving a
Sudoku puzzle. The processors at the heart of D-Wave's "Orion quantum computing system" are designed for use as
hardware accelerator processors rather than general-purpose computer
microprocessors. The system is designed to solve a particular
NP-complete problem related to the two-dimensional
Ising model in a
magnetic field. D-Wave terms the device as a 16-
qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor. According to the company, a conventional front-end running an application that requires the solution of an NP-complete problem, such as pattern matching, passes the problem to the Orion system. According to Geordie Rose, founder and Chief Technology Officer of D-Wave, NP-complete problems "are probably not exactly solvable, no matter how big, fast or advanced computers get"; the adiabatic quantum computer used by the Orion system is intended to quickly compute an approximate solution.
2009 Google demonstration On December 8, 2009, at the Neural Information Processing Systems (
NeurIPS) conference, a Google research team led by
Hartmut Neven used D-Wave's processor to train a binary image classifier.
D-Wave One On May 11, 2011, D-Wave announced the D-Wave One, an integrated quantum computer system running on a 128-qubit processor. The processor used in the D-Wave One, performs a single mathematical operation,
discrete optimization. Rainier uses quantum annealing to solve optimization problems. The D-Wave One was claimed to be the world's first commercially available quantum computer system. Its price was quoted at approximately
US$10,000,000.
Lockheed Martin and D-Wave collaboration In November 2010,
Lockheed Martin signed a multi-year contract with D-Wave to realize the benefits based upon a quantum annealing processor applied to some of Lockheed's most challenging computation problems. The contract was later announced on May 25, 2011. The contract included the purchase of the D-Wave One quantum computer, maintenance, and associated professional services.
Optimization problem-solving in protein structure determination In August 2012, a team of Harvard University researchers presented results of the largest protein-folding problem solved to date using a quantum computer. The researchers solved instances of a lattice protein folding model, known as the
Miyazawa–Jernigan model, on a D-Wave One quantum computer.
D-Wave Two In early 2012, D-Wave revealed a 512-qubit quantum computer, which was launched as a production processor in 2013. In May 2013,
Catherine McGeoch, a consultant for D-Wave, published the first comparison of the technology against regular top-end desktop computers running an optimization algorithm. Using a configuration with 439 qubits, the system performed 3,600 times as fast as
CPLEX, the best algorithm on the conventional machine, solving problems with 100 or more variables in half a second compared with half an hour. The results are presented at the Computing Frontiers 2013 conference. In March 2013, several groups of researchers at the Adiabatic Quantum Computing workshop at the
Institute of Physics in London, England, produced evidence, though only indirect, of
quantum entanglement in the D-Wave chips. In May 2013, it was announced that a collaboration between NASA, Google, and the USRA launched a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at
Ames Research Center in California, using a 512-qubit D-Wave Two that would be used for research into machine learning, among other fields of study.
D-Wave 2X and D-Wave 2000Q On August 20, 2015, D-Wave released the general availability of their D-Wave 2X computer, with 1000 qubits in a Chimera graph architecture (although, due to magnetic offsets and manufacturing variability inherent in the superconductor circuit fabrication, fewer than 1152 qubits are functional and available for use; the exact number of qubits yielded will vary with each specific processor manufactured). This was accompanied by a report comparing speeds with high-end single-threaded CPUs. Unlike previous reports, this one explicitly stated that the question of quantum speedup was not something they were trying to address, and focused on constant-factor performance gains over classical hardware. For general-purpose problems, a speedup of 15x was reported, but it is worth noting that these classical algorithms benefit efficiently from parallelization—so that the computer would be performing on par with, perhaps, 30 traditional high-end single-threaded cores. The D-Wave 2X processor is based on a 2048-qubit chip with half of the qubits disabled; these were activated in the D-Wave 2000Q.
Advantage In February 2019, D-Wave announced the next-generation system that would become the
Advantage and delivered that system in 2020. The Advantage architecture would increase the total number of qubits to 5760 and switch to the Pegasus graph topology, increasing the per-qubit connections to 15. D-Wave claimed the Advantage architecture provided a 10x speedup in time-to-solve over the 2000Q product offering. D-Wave claims that an incremental follow-up
Advantage Performance Update provides a 2x speedup over Advantage and a 20x speedup over 2000Q, among other improvements.
Advantage2 In 2021, D-Wave announced the next-generation system that would become the Advantage2 with delivery expected in late 2024 or early 2025. The Advantage architecture was expected to increase the total number of qubits to over 7000 and switch to the Zephyr graph topology, increasing the per-qubit connections to 20. As of July 17, 2025, the manufacturer claimed a "4,400+ qubit system" was generally available. == Incidents and criticisms ==