It will likely to launch within two years, the machine will again double the number of qubits, to around 4,000. Crucially, it will also provide more-complex connections between qubits, allowing it to tackle more-complicated problems.

"Changing the underlying connectivity is going to be a game-changer," says Mark Novotny, a physicist at Charles University in Prague, who is exploring a D-Wave machine's applications to cybersecurity. "I'm basically drooling hoping for it. It's very exciting."

D-Wave's latest 2000 qubit iteration includes an upgrade that Novotny has been clamoring for. The feature gives more control when different groups of qubits go through the annealing process. In at least one case, D-Wave has shown that this can speed up certain calculations 1,000-fold. For Novotny, the feature is crucial because it will allow his team to "sample" qubits during the process, which opens the door to D-Wave exploring a different type of machine-learning algorithm that could learn to recognize much more complex patterns of cyberattacks.