Power consumption for computation is a serious and growing issue for the world. We rely more and more on computing in everything we do as we try to satisfy our ever-increasing thirst for mobile computing, automation, machine intelligence, cloud computing, and increasingly powerful supercomputers. Highly specialized coprocessors such as D-Wave’s quantum processing units (QPUs) show promise in significantly increasing the power efficiency of computing. In a recent study, D-Wave’s 2000-qubit system was shown to be up to 100 times more energy efficient than highly specialized algorithms on state-of-the-art classical computing servers when considering pure computation time, suggesting immediate relevance to large-scale energy-efficient computing.