AT&T is using D-Wave’s quantum computing technology to shrink a network-optimization workload from roughly an hour of processing to under 15 seconds, D-Wave announced today. That’s about a 240X speedup on a real-world task, which sounds suspiciously like quantum advantage to me. As a result, AT&T has signed an agreement to expand its use of D-Wave’s quantum computing technology to attack optimization problems across its live network operations. That’s quantum computing in the real world, not in a research sandbox. And it’s quantum computing running for one of America’s largest carriers. “AT&T’s work with D-Wave is a powerful example of how leading enterprises are beginning to turn to quantum computing for solving real business problems,” Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave, said in a statement. “AT&T has incredibly complex optimization problems across its network operations, understands where classical computing is challenged, and is moving quickly to explore where quantum can make an impact.” Quantum computing has spent the better part of a decade as a story about the future: promising in the lab, perpetually five years away from mattering, and priced by public markets on hope rather than revenue. And there’s a lot to look forward to in the future as well, based on the conversations I’ve been having with quantum computing executives. But it’s exciting to see real results today. Like any big carrier, AT&T has seriously challenging optimization problems, with hundreds of millions of devices accessing its network to connect to the internet. It’s already using AI agents to diagnose and fix issues. But now AT&T is embedding D-Wave’s annealing quantum computers into those AI systems and using them to compute some of its hardest optimization problems: things like network build planning, traffic routing and load balancing, deciding how to reroute traffic in case of outages, or spectrum and