To my knowledge, it is an open challenge to find real-world problem instances where existing quantum annealers outperform state-of-the-art classical alternatives. It's even hard to find _extremely contrived families of instances_ where practical computational benefits can be observed with quantum annealing. I recently contributed to one such benchmarking manuscript [1], which may indicate future promise as the number of qubits in quantum annealers continues to increase.

Anyway, as a result of that experience, I'm skeptical of the benchmarking efforts that led these two companies to the conclusion that quantum annealing is more cost-effective than dropping in a classical alternative as the inner optimization solver. D-Wave even has some reasonably efficient, open-source algorithms that can be used as a point of comparison (e.g., [2]). I'd be interested in reading more about the companies' benchmarks, as this article is very light on details.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.04291.pdf

[2] https://github.com/dwavesystems/dwave-neal