D-Wave is extending its U.S. quantum-chip manufacturing relationship with SkyWater Technology under a new multi-year agreement, keeping a decade-old superconducting fabrication partnership in place as both companies push deeper into commercial quantum hardware.
D-Wave and SkyWater announced the agreement on October 13. The companies say SkyWater’s Bloomington, Minnesota fab will continue specialized semiconductor process development and manufacturing for D-Wave’s superconducting quantum systems.
The relationship is unusually important because superconducting quantum processors cannot simply move between standard chip fabs without significant process work. Materials, thin films, patterning, interfaces and fabrication tolerances all affect how the finished quantum device behaves at cryogenic temperatures. D-Wave says its work with SkyWater’s process-integration team now spans more than ten years.
D-Wave’s public X feed tracks its annealing and gate-model quantum-computing work.
The partnership has already produced multiple processor generations, including D-Wave’s Advantage2 chips. BitcoinVersus.Tech recently examined how SkyWater is expanding into a broader merchant quantum foundry for superconducting and photonic devices.
D-Wave introduces Advantage2, whose processors are among the quantum devices fabricated through the SkyWater relationship.
The most interesting result in the new announcement is not only the manufacturing contract. Earlier in 2026, D-Wave and SkyWater also tested D-Wave’s annealing technology on SkyWater’s own factory scheduling problem. The companies report that an optimized maintenance schedule reduced wafer-lot delays by as much as 30%. That figure comes from the companies’ proof-of-technology project and should not be treated as an independently validated industry-wide result.
A future proof-of-concept is expected to add more real-world constraints, including technician availability, resource availability and additional fab-specific operating requirements. Data Center Dynamics independently reported the new manufacturing agreement and the continued use of SkyWater’s Minnesota facility.
SkyWater’s public social feed covers semiconductor manufacturing and foundry development.
The corporate structure adds another layer. IonQ completed its acquisition of SkyWater in July, but SkyWater has said it will continue serving outside foundry customers. BitcoinVersus.Tech previously noted that this merchant model is important because competing quantum companies may need access to the same specialized U.S. fabrication infrastructure while protecting proprietary process and device information.
IonQ explains its July acquisition of SkyWater and the foundry’s role inside its vertically integrated quantum strategy.
That makes D-Wave’s renewed agreement a useful test of the model: SkyWater is owned by one quantum-computing company while continuing to manufacture processors for another. The arrangement also reinforces why BitcoinVersus.Tech has argued that quantum computing still has no single winning architecture. Foundry infrastructure may need to support several competing approaches for years.
The manufacturing problem is becoming as important as the qubit problem. Quantum roadmaps require repeatable materials, packaging, cryogenic interfaces, control electronics and process yields—not only laboratory demonstrations. That same systems challenge is visible in DARPA’s hardware-validation program, which is testing whether ambitious quantum architectures survive contact with real engineering constraints.
D-Wave’s new deal does not prove that superconducting annealing will dominate quantum computing. It does show that the company is locking in manufacturing continuity while quantum hardware moves from one-off research devices toward repeatable industrial production.
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