Got $1,000? 2 Growth Stocks Building the Quantum Computing Revolution

Six quantum computing companies went public in 2026, and most investors still cannot name more than two of them. That actually suggests opportunity.

The popular names, IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) and Rigetti Computing (NASDAQ: RGTI), get the headlines and much of the retail interest. Meanwhile, two newer listings are doing the less glamorous work of actually building and shipping quantum machines to paying customers.

With $1,000 to put to work, splitting it between these two lesser-known quantum stocks gives you one company that already installs computers in data centers today and one that just posted the best error-correction result anyone has published.

Image source: Getty Images.

1. IQM Quantum Computers

IQM Quantum Computers (NASDAQ: IQMX) is a Finnish company whose American depositary shares began trading on the Nasdaq in July, making it the first European quantum computing company listed on a major U.S. exchange.It does not sell cloud access to a machine in its own lab (although some customers do). It builds superconducting quantum computers, crates them up, and installs them in the customer's building. By its own count, it has sold 23 systems to 13 customers, more than any other manufacturer, and that is a different business than most of its peers.

The 2026 customer list shows why all that matters. In June, IQM delivered a 20-qubit system to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the lab's first commercially purchased quantum computer. In April, a Polish IT company called Galaxy Systemy Informatyczne agreed to buy a 54-qubit machine for its own data center, the first private enterprise anywhere to own one of this type, with installation set for this quarter. In September alone, IQM announced a second system for Japan's TOYO Corp., its first sale in South America to Brazil's Eldorado Research Institute, and a contract to build Europe's first superconducting machine with logical qubits for the LUMI AI Factory in Finland.

The company's order backlog passed 102 million euros in August, against 2026 revenue guidance of 42 million to 47 million euros. In plain terms, it has already booked more than two years of sales.

2. Quantinuum: The one solving the hard problem

Quantinuum (NASDAQ: QNT) was the largest quantum IPO ever when it listed in June at $60 a share, and the stock has since fallen to the mid-$30s. What has not fallen is the pace of its science. The central problem in quantum computing is that qubits make errors constantly, and a useful machine needs to catch and fix those errors faster than they pile up. On Oct. 19, Quantinuum announced that its Helios computer achieved a logical fidelity of 99.9995%, which translates to five errors per million operations. That is 10 times better than the record it set a month earlier and, by the company's account, 100 times better than the best published result on any competing hardware. A Sandia National Laboratories researcher not involved in the study said the findings "go a long way to retire one of the field's central technical risks."

The business side is catching up to the lab. In August, Quantinuum signed a multiyear deal with Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) to host Helios in a U.S. Oracle Cloud data center, where enterprise customers can run it alongside their GPUs. In September, it finalized a $100 million CHIPS Act award from the Commerce Department and named GlobalFoundries (NASDAQ: GFS) as a partner to fabricate its next-generation ion traps on 300-millimeter wafers. That is a quantum company moving from hand-built lab equipment toward something resembling a semiconductor supply chain. The company says its fault-tolerant machine, Apollo, is on track for 2029.

How to split $1,000 between these quantum stocks

Neither company will be profitable soon, and quantum stocks can lose significant value within a month, as both did this fall. That is the price of admission. But IQM gives you a company with a backlog and a delivery schedule, and Quantinuum gives you the one closest to the technical finish line. I would put $500 in each and plan to hold for five years, not five quarters. If you can only stomach one, Quantinuum's Oct. 19 result is the kind of milestone that tends to get remembered.

Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Globalfoundries, IonQ, and Oracle. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.