If we're talking about the D-Wave in particular then no, I don't think there's anybody who's going to prefer them for real work as they're not competitive. I'm

If we're talking about the D-Wave in particular then no, I don't think there's anybody who's going to prefer them for real work as they're not competitive. I'm pretty sure most people are buying them as experimental platforms to play with an emerging technology and nobody expects them to actually be practical. If we're talking about quantum computers in general, then there's several places where a hypothetical ideal quantum computer with competitive performance would have an advantage. The typical example is in cryptography, where Shor's integer factorization algorithm ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm ) would likely be fast enough to break modern public key cryptography in reasonable (i.e., polynomial) time.