D-Wave is a Canadian company and one of the earliest commercial quantum vendors. It builds superconducting qubits related to Transmon qubits, but wires them for quantum annealing instead of gate-model circuits like IBM Quantum and Google Quantum AI run. Qubits are coupled to represent an optimization problem as an energy landscape, then slowly evolved so they settle into a low-energy state that approximates the answer.

This limits D-Wave's hardware to combinatorial optimization and sampling, not universal computation. It let the company reach thousands of physical qubits well before gate-model competitors did, and it now sells annealing hardware and cloud access for real-world optimization work.