Rocket Lab Q2 revenue beats, but loss was deeper than expected

Quantum Computing is leaping double-digits in pre-market trading on Monday after the integrated photonic quantum company jumped back into profitability in its third-quarter earnings, with the company’s strong balance sheet set to enable a ramp-up of production and R&D.

Revenue increased 280% year-over-year for the quarter to $384,000, largely thanks to a purchase order worth ~$332,000 from a top 5 US bank back in July for quantum cybersecurity solutions.

Perhaps most important, however, were comments from the company’s leadership about how it plans to deploy its swelling cash coffers.

After the company’s recent $750 million raise, QUBT’s balance sheet is now in a strong position, with the company stating that it “ended the third quarter with $352 million in cash and $461 million in investments, and subsequent to the quarter raised an additional $750 million, giving us a substantial liquid position of over $1.5 billion today.”

That gives the company the largest cash pile amongst the four public pure-play quantum companies, a war chest which QCi looks to use “to implement our TFLN fabrication and quantum machine development initiatives,” alongside acquisition opportunities, according to CFO Chris Roberts on the earnings call.

Indeed, QUBT’s leadership remained bullish about creating a “robust quantum products platform leveraging TFLN integrated chip technology” from 2028 and beyond. The company’s CEO, Yuping Huang, said on the earnings call that (emphasis ours):

Our long-term goal is to move from prototype and small-batch manufacturing towards volume production, and we see that transition take shape by the end of this decade. To get there, our current three-year roadmap is focused on refining our processes, scaling small-batch production, and expanding our team and facility to position QSA for industrial-scale output.

In other words, the technology is there. Our quantum machines and photonic chips have been validated across multiple use cases. The next step is to scale the engineering and the manufacturing behind them, and we now have the team, resources, facility, and plan to make that happen.

Amidst a wider pullback in speculative stocks, QUBT has been deeply in the red in recent weeks, down 42% in the past month.

Go deeper: Quantum computing companies are stacking up piles of cash, capitalizing on their booming stock prices

As we head toward the last hour of a wild week of trading, the buckle-up vibes the market started out with Friday have mellowed into a modestly positive day, with the Invesco QQQ Trust and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF both in the green.

But the volatility was pretty wild for some of the high-beta momentum stocks that have taken some of the worst beatings in recent days.

Shares like Applied Digital and Bloom Energy saw cumulative swings on the day along the lines of 20 percentage points. Even those that haven’t quite managed to stay positive, like IREN and Oklo, have nonetheless erased sizable losses.

Why? Frankly, it’s impossible to say. The same uncertainties that the market was facing yesterday — doubts about further rate hikes, confusion about the state of the economy, jitters about the potential for the AI boom to turn into a bust — are still hovering out there somewhere. Perhaps it will take more than a 2-percentage point drop from record highs for the major indexes — about the extent of the recent sell-off — to dull the retail reflex to buy the dip.

Memory chip specialist Micron is soaring after Reuters reported that Samsung has raised prices of select memory chips by as much as 60% since September, citing two people with knowledge of the price changes.

Memory chips play a key supporting role in the AI boom by feeding high-powered GPUs with data to process.

Micron, the biggest US memory chip seller, has been on an absolute tear, more than doubling in price since the end of August. Shares recently traded more than 15% above the average analyst price target, a record based on data going back to 2007.

These days, you need a pretty good memory to keep up with all the bullish news flow surrounding memory chip stocks, whether it’s been reports of imminent price hikes for these chips, South Korean memory giant SK Hynix already being sold out of all its 2026 production, or Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang nodding at shortages of these valuable components.