Pasqal revenue falls as service growth cushions lost system sales

By Amara Osei

What changed in the quarter?

Pasqal (NASDAQ: PSQL) generated EUR 3.3 million in third-quarter 2026 revenue, down from EUR 5.7 million a year earlier. Growth in quantum processing unit services partly offset absent system sales, leaving the top line lower and making service adoption the immediate financial test.

QPU-related services revenue rose 53% to EUR 3.1 million from EUR 2 million, including initial hours consumed under Pasqal’s quantum computing as a service arrangement with Aramco. The year-earlier quarter included EUR 3.2 million in QPU sales; Pasqal recorded none in the latest period.

CEO Wasiq Bokhari called the quarter weak in reported revenue and the order book, while saying Pasqal had expanded its pipeline across enterprise, sovereign and public-sector opportunities.

At Aramco’s Dhahran data center, Bokhari said Pasqal’s QPU was being used in line with expectations and use cases were growing. He cited “encouraging signals” of a return on investment relative to classical computing resources. The takeaway: service growth softened, but did not erase, the gap left by missing system sales.

What do the order book and deliveries show?

Pasqal’s order book of firm, unfulfilled orders stood at EUR 69.8 million at September-end, roughly unchanged from June. CFO Stéphane Rougeot declined bookings guidance, leaving the pipeline without a forecast for future orders.

Three systems are in production, some for internal use, and management expects some deliveries toward year-end. Rougeot reported no particular delivery issues, but said commissioning and customer acceptance of an on-premise system generally take at least 12 months after an order, and sometimes longer.

QPU sales add more to the order book upfront but take at least a year to become revenue. QPU-hour sales convert over a few months as customers develop and advance use cases. The takeaway: stable orders offer support, while system timing remains slow.

What is the Aramco engagement showing?

CFO Stéphane Rougeot said close to 10 use cases were underway with Aramco. More advanced projects were consuming more QPU hours, while newer projects required work to define algorithms and demonstrate returns before usage increased.

Pasqal wants deeper customer relationships and uses those engagements to reach new clients in energy, material simulation and financial services. Bokhari said it aims to build a reusable library of business solutions for those sectors. The takeaway: Aramco is a test bed for repeatable products.

Where do partnerships extend the pipeline?

Pasqal’s Saudi activity now spans commercial deployment, research and applied workloads:

• An agreement with Eleven Ventures will form a commercial joint venture to deploy and scale Pasqal systems across Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East and North Africa.
• A research collaboration with KACST’s National Center for Quantum Technologies focuses on quantum solutions related to cryptography.
• A partnership with USA Rare Earth and Riven Systems will develop separation technology and explore potential extracting molecules for rare earth elements.
• With Saudi-based True Nexus, Pasqal used neutral-atom QPUs to encode protein structures tied to gelation, the process that gives foods structure and texture.
• A partnership with Crédit Agricole CIB covers portfolio optimization and risk modeling; Bokhari targeted initial production use cases as early as 2028.

The takeaway: the partnership map reaches public research, industrial processing and financial services, but commercial conversion remains the next step.

What does the technology roadmap require?

Bokhari reiterated Pasqal’s goal of delivering more than 10,000 physical qubits and more than 200 logical qubits, with six nines of logical fidelity, by the end of 2029. Over the next 12 months, the company expects to demonstrate logical registers running error correction and declining logical error rates as it implements different codes.

Pasqal is also scaling photonic-chip technology that controls atoms with laser light. Moving more control onto a chip could shrink the optical footprint of future processors by up to 50 times. In October, the company made an AI-assisted workflow available on Pasqal Cloud, allowing researchers to use agentic coding tools with its cloud QPUs.

The takeaway: the roadmap pairs a 2029 hardware target with nearer-term error-correction tests and lower-cost scaling.

How much cash runway remains?

Pasqal ended September with EUR 312.8 million in bank cash following its business combination. Government grant income was EUR 1 million for the quarter, up from EUR 0.7 million a year earlier.

Rougeot said hiring was on track, though slower than desired, with commercial roles the main focus. Annual cash burn was EUR 40 million to EUR 50 million in both 2024 and 2025; he expected some increase, but not a significant one.

He said the cash provided several years of runway, until at least the end of the decade. The takeaway: liquidity covers the planned increase in annual spending.

What does Pasqal sell?

Pasqal is a France-based quantum computing company developing processors, software and application solutions based on neutral-atom technology. Its systems use individually controlled atoms to perform quantum computations and address problems that can be difficult for conventional computing. It sells hardware and cloud access, plus tools for developing, testing and running quantum algorithms.

The takeaway: the product set spans machines, cloud capacity and software, with revenue timing dependent on sales and service use.