Quantum companies have low revenue and high costs

How rising burn rates, long development cycles, and scarce near-term use cases create financial bottlenecks that slow the transition toward practical quantum advantage

The pure play is expensive. We are starting to see people say the obvious thing about low revenue or projected revenues that won’t be gigantic compared to high burn rates. Quantum companies face a persistent imbalance because their revenue remains extremely limited while the costs of building viable hardware continue to rise, creating a financial environment that slows progress toward fault-tolerant systems [1]. Most firms rely on government programs and long-horizon private investment because near-term commercial demand cannot cover expenses associated with fabrication, cryogenics, control systems, and multidisciplinary engineering teams. This gap shapes the competitive landscape since only a few organizations can sustain multi-year burn rates while improving qubit fidelity and advancing logical qubit architectures. The resulting pressure underscores why breakthroughs in materials science, error correction, and hybrid quantum-classical integration are viewed as essential for pushing the sector toward durable commercial outcomes.

Footnotes:

[1] Neiger, C. (2025, November 24). These are the 2 biggest hurdles for the quantum computing industry right now. Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2-biggest-hurdles-quantum-computing-120500837.html