Quantum Intelligence Daily — 2026-05-12

Tuesday’s edition is anchored by two same-quarter listed-quantum earnings prints surfaced via after-market filings dated 2026-05-11: Rigetti Computing’s 199% YoY revenue triple plus Cepheus-1-108Q general availability, and Quantum Computing Inc’s first post-Luminar quarter with $3.7M revenue and Fab 1 generating early production. Both events are within the Step 7b trailing 10-day late-discovery window (one day late) and trigger same-day daily-newsletter promotion under the score-≥6 rule. Both were released after the prior scheduled-run window (Monday 07:10Z) closed.

Lead

The listed-quantum cohort’s Q1 2026 print cycle continued after the market close on 2026-05-11 with sequentially-filed 8-K Item 2.02 disclosures from two superconducting-and-photonic pure-plays. Rigetti Computing (RGTI) reported Q1 2026 revenue of $4.4M against $1.472M in Q1 2025 — a 199% year-over-year increase and a $0.27M beat against consensus of $4.13M — and concurrently announced general availability of its 108-qubit Cepheus-1-108Q superconducting processor with median two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.8% at 40 ns gate speeds. Quantum Computing Inc (QUBT) reported Q1 2026 revenue of $3.69M (consensus $3.27M; beat by $0.42M), driven primarily by the February 2026 Luminar Semiconductor acquisition, and confirmed for the first time that its thin-film lithium niobate Fab 1 facility is generating early production revenue.

Combined with IonQ’s 2026-05-06 Q1 print of $64.7M (+755% YoY) and the still-pending D-Wave Q1 print scheduled for pre-market 2026-05-12, this week represents the most-condensed listed-quantum earnings cluster the system has logged. Quantinuum’s audited FY2025 baseline of $30.9M (per the 2026-05-08 public S-1) now sits alongside these listed comparables ahead of its eventual IPO pricing.

Top Developments

Rigetti Computing Q1 2026: revenue triples to $4.4M; 108-qubit Cepheus-1 in general availability; $569M cash

Per Rigetti’s 8-K filed 2026-05-11 (SEC EDGAR accession 0001104659-26-058635, Items 2.02 and 9.01) and the accompanying Exhibit 99.1 press release: Q1 2026 revenue was $4.4M against $1.472M in the year-ago quarter, a 199% increase. Non-GAAP net loss was $14.7M (non-GAAP diluted EPS of $(0.04), in line with consensus); operating loss was $26.0M. Cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments totaled $569.0M at 2026-03-31, the strongest balance sheet among listed superconducting pure-play quantum hardware names. Operating cash flow was $(16.2M).

The technical anchor of today’s release is the general availability of the Cepheus-1-108Q system: a 108-qubit superconducting processor architected as twelve interconnected 9-qubit chiplets. The disclosed median two-qubit gate fidelity is 99.8% at 40 nanosecond gate speeds, with two-qubit gate fidelities as high as 99.9% reported on prototype systems. The platform is accessible via Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure Quantum, and qBraid. The company also confirmed completion of a 9-qubit Novera QPU on-premises system sale to the University of Saskatchewan and reiterated the previously-announced up-to-$100M UK quantum expansion commitment (event 2026-03-25-rigetti-uk-100m-investment).

Market reception was notably muted relative to the headline beat — Barron’s coverage was titled “Rigetti Computing Revenue Triples. Why the Quantum Stock Is Falling,” suggesting that the in-line non-GAAP EPS and the absence of forward revenue guidance constrained the upside reaction. No formal revenue guidance was provided.

Score: 6. Anchor row §8.2 6 (“Quarterly revenue beat or miss by a meaningful margin for a tracked public name”). Held below 7 because non-GAAP EPS was in-line rather than a meaningful beat, no forward guidance was issued, and the share-price reaction was negative — indicating expectations were met rather than exceeded. The Cepheus-1-108Q GA milestone with 99.8% median 2Q fidelity is a meaningful technical advance but does not on its own cross into the band-7 “Major partnership” or “Material capital event” anchor rows. Per CLAUDE.md close-call-rounds-down, 6 is the defensible band. Source confidence high (SEC EDGAR 8-K accession 0001104659-26-058635 plus Exhibit 99.1, Seeking Alpha, Barron’s). Interpretation confidence high.

Quantum Computing Inc Q1 2026: $3.69M revenue (94x YoY, largely Luminar-driven), Fab 1 generating early production revenue, $16M contract backlog

Per QCi’s 8-K filed 2026-05-11 (SEC EDGAR accession 0001213900-26-054470, Items 2.02 and 9.01) and the accompanying Exhibit 99.1 press release: Q1 2026 revenue was $3.69M against $39 thousand in Q1 2025 — a 94-fold increase attributed primarily to the February 2026 Luminar Semiconductor acquisition ($110M all-cash, photonic components covering lasers, detectors, and advanced packaging). The revenue figure beat consensus of $3.27M by $0.42M. GAAP net loss was $4.1M ($0.02 per basic share); the year-over-year swing from Q1 2025’s reported $17.0M net income to today’s $4.1M net loss was attributed by management to the decrease in the non-cash gain on the mark-to-market of warrant-related derivative liabilities — i.e., the Q1 2025 “income” was largely a non-cash warrant revaluation rather than operating profit. Non-GAAP EPS beat consensus by $0.03.

Cash, cash equivalents, and investments at 2026-03-31 stood at $1.4B, down modestly from $1.5B at year-end 2025. Contract backlog was approximately $16M at quarter-end — the first public bookings figure since the Luminar transaction closed and a useful new data point for forward-revenue modeling.

The operational substance of today’s print is the confirmation that the thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) Fab 1 facility “has begun to generate early revenue” through small-batch manufacturing, and that the company is “actively exploring options for a planned Fab 2 facility” to expand production capacity. This is the first time QCi has anchored Q1 revenue contribution to the post-acquisition TFLN foundry pivot rather than to legacy optimization-software bookings. The release also confirmed completion of the previously-announced $5M NuCrypt acquisition for quantum communications and quantum photonics capabilities.

Score: 6. Anchor row §8.2 6 (“Quarterly revenue beat or miss by a meaningful margin for a tracked public name”). Held at 6 rather than 7 because the headline 94x YoY revenue growth is almost entirely inorganic (Luminar contribution); organic Q1 2026 revenue is meaningfully smaller than the $3.7M headline. Held above 5 because the revenue beat is real, the Fab 1 early-revenue + Fab 2 planning disclosure adds operational substance beyond M&A integration noise, and the $16M backlog disclosure is informative. Per CLAUDE.md close-call-rounds-down. Source confidence high (SEC EDGAR 8-K accession 0001213900-26-054470 plus Exhibit 99.1, PRNewswire press release, Seeking Alpha). Interpretation confidence high.

Capital & Funding

Both leading items today are listed-name earnings prints rather than primary capital events. No new private quantum financings closed in the trailing 24-hour window. The €18M Algorithmiq Series A and HQ relocation from Helsinki to Milan (announced 2026-05-11; Italy’s largest-ever quantum VC round; led by United Ventures and CDP Venture Capital with continued Inventure VC participation) scored at the score-5 band and will surface in next Monday’s 2026-W20 weekly roll-up per the Step 7b “score-5 late-discovered → weekly only” rule. Total Algorithmiq funding to date now stands at €36M.

Technical progress

Rigetti’s Cepheus-1-108Q general availability with 99.8% median two-qubit gate fidelity is the technical anchor of today’s print. The 99.9% prototype-system 2Q fidelity figure, if it reaches production maturity, would put Rigetti within the band of fidelities relevant to the surface-code error-correction crossover argument. The published architecture (twelve interconnected 9-qubit chiplets totaling 108 physical qubits) is the first 100+ physical-qubit Rigetti superconducting system in general availability and is a substantive step beyond the prior Ankaa-class systems.

Talent

No standalone material talent items today. The NYU Quantum Institute × IBM postdoctoral research program (2026-05-11) was logged as a partnership_without_scope rejection in rejections/2026-05.jsonl — the program has named technical scope but no committed dollar value, named milestones, or exclusivity per the §7.4 rule.

Policy & geopolitics

No new policy items today.

Post-quantum cryptography

No new PQC items today.

Insider signals

The EODHD insider incremental fetch (cursor 2026-04-28 → today=2026-05-12) across all 20 tracked US-listed quantum and quantum-adjacent tickers returned zero new transactions in the window. The cursor advances zero days; combined trailing-90-day stream remains at the prior baseline. Pattern detection over the existing stream is unchanged from scheduled-run-11; open_insider_patterns remains empty.

Methodology note

Two same-day events — both Q1 2026 earnings prints dated 2026-05-11 (after-market Eastern Time, ~20:00 UTC), surfaced today via combined EODHD news scan and EODHD earnings calendar; both corroborated against SEC EDGAR 8-K filings (Rigetti accession 0001104659-26-058635; QUBT accession 0001213900-26-054470) per the §7.5 supplementary-source rule. The prior scheduled run closed at 07:10Z on 2026-05-11, before either issuer’s after-market release; today’s 07:06Z run picks up both as Step 7b late-discovery items within the trailing 10-day window. The EODHD earnings calendar additionally showed D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) with actual populated as 0 against a Q1 2026 estimate of $(0.0631) for report_date 2026-05-12; however, D-Wave’s actual press release and conference call are scheduled for 12:00 UTC (8:00 a.m. ET pre-market), five hours after this run’s wall-clock start — the EODHD actual=0 reading is a calendar placeholder rather than a published result. D-Wave Q1 will be logged in tomorrow’s run (scheduled-run-13) if the release follows the announced timetable. The SkyWater Q1 earnings release scheduled for 2026-05-13 is outside today’s window. The Cisco Q3 FY26 release scheduled for 2026-05-13 AfterMarket is outside today’s window and will be evaluated under the §7.4 rule-8 “big-tech parent earnings without quantum specifics” filter — Cisco is tracked in the master list because of the Atom Computing networking partnership (event 2026-03-25-atom-computing-cisco-distributed-quantum-partnership), and only quantum-specific commentary in the call would promote the print to an event.

Step 3 web sweep surfaced three additional candidate items below the daily-publication threshold, which will surface (if at all) in the 2026-W20 weekly: Algorithmiq’s €18M Series A and Helsinki→Milan HQ relocation (2026-05-11, score 5); The King’s Foundation × FormationQ × IonQ “Harmonious Urban Growth” 3-year programme launch (2026-05-11, score 5); Icarus Quantum × USAF SBIR contract with NIST for high-efficiency entangled photon sources (2026-05-11, score 4). The NYU Quantum Institute × IBM postdoctoral research program (2026-05-11) was rejected under §7.4 rule 2 (partnership_without_scope).