The company recently shelled out big money to Canadian firm for the world's first commercial quantum computer.

D-Wave says quantum computers can be used to solve hard problems that ordinarily take too long even for supercomputers. Some examples: Financial risk analysis, object recognition in images, computer vision, and bioinformatics - the types of analytical thinking that people are good at, but computers find difficult.

The shiny new D-Wave One sold to Lockheed Martin comes with a team of researchers who will work closely with the company in the years ahead to get the most from the system. The companies were mum on the purchase price.

Not everyone is a believer in the technology.

It's hard to prove that quantum computing is even taking place. But D-Wave claims to have realized "quantum annealing" in its hardware, as . Still, there are some scientists who .