Most of those organizations are happy to dump $1 million into something with so much potential power on the off-chance that it turns out to work. In fact, if I was in charge of Google, and understood the extremely tiny chance that D-Wave is legit, I would still dump in money, because the tiny chance it works still makes it worth it.

But they (in particular, Google) also have experts in quantum physics and computing on staff, so they're much better equipped than most to determine the validity of the claim.

The actual price for a D-Wave machine is more than $10M. It's a good sign that the first customers have continued their support by upgrading to the newer models.

As a taxpayer I'm glad those organizations buy these machines, just as they bought Connection Machines, Crays, etc. Some of those bets panned out. And in fact if that money went into nothing but more understanding of the difficulties of quantum computing wouldn't you be glad?

But I don't make the mistake of interpreting a purchase as some sort of endorsement. It's merely an endorsement that "your plausibility level is above our noise floor".

The DoD will give you a few thousand USD if you write a good enough proposal for the military benefits of sharks with freaking lasers on their heads for the defense of navy vessels [1].

Throwing a few million at a prototype computer on the off chance it works is well within the budget.

[1] Austin Power reference not a real research project.

We do however, since the 1940s, have dolphins with bombs.