Investing & Dividends Mostly accurate, with one big caveat

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-05-21 · 7 min read

Quantum stocks ‘bigger than NVDA’? The losses and timeline left unsaid

Verdict: Mostly accurate, with one big caveat. The companies, roadmaps, and revenue numbers Professor G cites are real — what gets glossed over is the 15-year commercialization horizon, the eight- and nine-figure annual losses, and price-to-sales ratios that look more like 1999 than 2012’s early Nvidia.

In Forget NVDA.. These Quantum Stocks Will Be Bigger, Nolan Gobea — known on YouTube as Professor G of Investing Simplified — pitches six quantum-computing names as the next pre-launch inflection point, the way Nvidia looked before ChatGPT. The video has racked up roughly 86,000 views. The implicit promise is that getting in now on IonQ, IBM, Google, Honeywell, Rigetti, and D-Wave is like buying NVDA in 2014. Most of the facts check out. The framing doesn’t.

What the video actually claims

Professor G opens with a market-size stat: global quantum computing is projected to grow from about $1.88 billion in 2026 to nearly $20 billion by 2035, a 30% compounded annual growth rate. He then walks through six picks. IonQ is the “growth play,” with a recent quarter showing $64.7 million in revenue and a quoted 755% year-over-year jump, plus guidance of around $270 million for full-year 2026. IBM is the “bedrock,” with a public roadmap pointing toward 100,000-qubit-class systems by 2033 and Qiskit already used by 250-plus organizations. Google gets credit for the Willow chip’s error-correction breakthrough. Honeywell is the “low-risk” play through its majority stake in Quantinuum, which raised $600 million at a $10 billion valuation. Rigetti is the “high-risk, high-reward” pure-play. D-Wave gets honorable-mention status, partly because it just agreed to buy Quantum Circuits for $550 million.

To his credit, he does flag volatility, calls out that several names are still unprofitable, and reminds viewers it’s not financial advice. There’s also a mid-roll sponsorship for a portfolio tracker called Snowball Analytics, disclosed on screen.

The headline frame, though, is the part that gets clicks: bigger than NVDA. Nvidia is currently the most valuable company on the planet. That’s a heavy comparison to drop on names whose combined annual revenue would barely cover Nvidia’s office snacks.

What the math actually says

Most of the technical and corporate claims in the video are accurate enough. Google’s Willow processor really did demonstrate below-threshold quantum error correction in late 2024, with a paper in Nature. IBM has publicly committed to its Starling architecture by 2029 and a roughly 2,000-logical-qubit Blue Jay system by 2033. Honeywell’s $600 million Quantinuum raise at a $10 billion pre-money valuation did close in September 2025. D-Wave’s $550 million deal for Quantum Circuits, announced in January 2026, is also on the record.

The IonQ figure needs a footnote. The 755% year-over-year revenue jump to $64.67 million is real — that was the headline number from a single quarter earlier in 2025 — but more recent results have been more modest. IonQ’s Q3 2025 report on file with the SEC shows 222% year-over-year growth, not 755%. Big number, but a decelerating one.

The bigger issue is what the video skips. Rigetti — the “leveraged smaller version of the thesis” — generated $7.1 million in revenue for full-year 2025 and reported a $216 million net loss, not the “$25 million projected” figure quoted in the video. IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave, and Quantum Computing Inc. all remain pre-profit. They’re funded by repeated share issuance and cash on the balance sheet, not operating earnings.

Then there’s the timeline. In January 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said “very useful” quantum computers were probably 15 to 30 years away — most likely around 20. Quantum stocks cratered on the comment, with IonQ and Rigetti both dropping more than 40% in a session. Huang later walked it back at Nvidia’s March 2025 Quantum Day event, conceding his phrasing was off and joking he hadn’t realized some of these companies were publicly traded. He didn’t actually move the timeline much. “Useful at scale” is still a 2030s-to-2040s story for most credible roadmaps.

And the valuations? As of mid-2026, price-to-sales ratios across the pure-plays sit in the triple digits and beyond — by some measures north of 100 for IonQ, several hundred for D-Wave, and into four digits for Rigetti. For comparison, dot-com darlings of 1999 typically peaked in the 30-to-45 range. That doesn’t mean the bubble bursts tomorrow, but anyone buying at these multiples is paying for a 2035 revenue run-rate today, with no margin for error.

Who actually wins this trade?

If quantum becomes commercially material in the next decade, the most reliable winners are unlikely to be the pure-plays. They’re the ones with the leverage — but also the ones most likely to be diluted into oblivion, acquired at a discount, or simply outspent. IBM, Google parent Alphabet, and Honeywell can fund quantum research from operating cash flow for the next 10 years and barely feel it. A win for them shows up as a percentage point or two of total revenue, eventually. A win for Rigetti or IonQ would show up as a moonshot — but so would a failure, in the other direction.

The other group that wins is the people selling shovels: cloud providers running quantum-as-a-service, ETF issuers collecting fees on the theme, and large incumbents like Nvidia, which has positioned itself as the hybrid GPU-plus-QPU orchestration layer through its CUDA-Q stack. None of that requires picking the right hardware horse.

Retail investors buying single names at today’s multiples aren’t really making a bet on quantum. They’re making a bet on a specific company surviving 10-plus years of cash burn without massive dilution, against well-funded incumbents, with a still-undefined commercial product.

That isn’t the same bet as buying Nvidia in 2014.

What you’d realistically earn

Could one of these names go up 10x? Sure. Several already have, in both directions, in the past 18 months. IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave all crashed roughly 11% to 19% in single sessions in early 2026 on no specific news. Single-day moves of 6%-9% are now characteristic of the group, not thesis-breaking.

A more honest range for a buy-and-hold investor over the next five years looks like this: extremely wide. Total losses are plausible if one of the pure-plays runs out of cash or gets acquired below current prices. So are multibaggers if a commercial breakthrough lands sooner than expected. The expected value isn’t crazy — it’s just dominated by tail outcomes, not steady compounding. The U.S. SEC’s own Investor Bulletin on speculative microcap-style risk puts it plainly: the only money to put in speculative names is money you can lose entirely. That guidance was written for microcaps, but the same logic applies to single-stock bets on pre-revenue or pre-profit tech. U.S. readers should also know the SEC actively monitors income-and-return claims; equivalent regulators include the FCA in the U.K., ASIC in Australia, SEBI in India, and ESMA across the EU.

How does that compare to the implicit promise of the video? “Like buying Nvidia early” suggests a 50-to-100x return over a decade with manageable downside. Nothing in the current data supports putting those odds on quantum pure-plays in 2026.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

This kind of basket fits a fairly narrow profile: an investor with a multi-decade horizon, a diversified core portfolio, and a small “venture sleeve” they’re comfortable seeing cut in half. If you’d genuinely lose sleep over a 50% drawdown in any position, this isn’t that position. If you’re putting money in because you missed Nvidia and feel like the universe owes you a do-over, that’s not a thesis — that’s revenge investing, and the market is not in the habit of granting refunds.

Investors looking for thematic exposure with less single-stock blast radius can look at quantum-focused ETFs, which spread bets across the pure-plays and the big incumbents. Investopedia has a primer on the major quantum ETF options for anyone who’d rather not pick winners. We’ve also written about the best quantum computing ETF and about how to think about single-stock pick videos more broadly.

What to remember

Professor G isn’t selling a scam. The companies exist, the roadmaps are public, and the breakthroughs are real. What’s missing is the part where commercial quantum is still a 2030s story, the pure-plays burn cash, and current multiples already price in a fairly bullish version of the future. “Bigger than NVDA” makes a great thumbnail. As an investment thesis, it needs a much longer asterisk than a four-minute pitch can fit.