D-Wave Quantum, AT&T Expand Deal; Quantum Annealing Cuts Network Optimization from ~1 Hour to Under 15 Seconds

D-Wave Quantum announced a new cooperation agreement with U. S. telecommunications operator AT&T, expanding AT&T's use of D-Wave's quantum annealing technology in high-speed network optimization. In an early deployment, D-Wave reduced processing time for a network optimization workload from about one hour to under 15 seconds.

AT&T initially plans to integrate D-Wave's quantum annealing technology into the tools that support its agentic AI solutions. The solutions have already helped reduce customer service interruption time by approximately 12 million hours in 2025. AT&T plans to evaluate D-Wave's quantum technology in more application scenarios, including fault detection with instantaneous response, technician route planning, network infrastructure construction planning, and traffic management.

D-Wave's quantum annealing technology converts problems such as network scheduling, route planning, resource allocation, and combinatorial selection into Ising model or QUBO form, seeking approximate optimal solutions by finding low-energy states of the system. It is suitable for combinatorial optimization with many variables and complex constraints. AT&T's technician dispatch, fault response, and network traffic management fall into this category, so the cooperation has expanded from the validation phase to more network operation scenarios.