IonQ Investor Day Transcipt With Cross References - Part II
IonQ 2026 Investor Day
Speaker-Attributed Transcript
PART I: THE FULL TRANSCRIPT
PART II: DETAILED CROSS REFERENCE GUIDE BY SPEAKER AND SUBJECT
Note: This report requires two parts due to the size of the report.
This report begins with Part II. If you wnat to read the full transcript click here .
If you need | Go to | Page |
The event as the room heard it, opening to close | Part I | 5 |
One speaker read end to end, without tracking them across three hours | Part II | 33 |
What IonQ published on the day, and what it did not | Part III | 65 |
To read what was said on a subject, gathered in one place | Appendix A | 66 |
Where a company, product, program or person was named | Appendix B | 86 |
What the analysts asked, and how far the answers went | Appendix C | 88 |
Who said a number, and what the number was attached to | Appendix D | 90 |
Dated commitments to check against a future quarter | Appendix D, group IV | 90 |
The four indexes, and what each one answers
Appendix A, the subject digest — twenty-three categories covering the whole of the event, and under each one the spoken material itself: three hundred and forty-nine passages, verbatim, each with the speaker and timestamp. This is the appendix to work from. A reader taking up one question — the foundry, the sovereign relationships, the merchant supply argument — can read what was said about it in one place, and go back to Part I only for the surrounding remarks. The categories are the series’ standing analytical framework, so the same scheme indexes these proceedings elsewhere in the coverage, and a thin category says what the room did not spend its time on.
Appendix B, the name index — fifty-five entries and a hundred and fifty-eight references covering the companies, products, programs, institutions, places and people named from the stage, alphabetically. An entry means the name was spoken in that turn, not that the turn is about it. Use it when the question is narrow and concrete: every mention of Fab 25, of Qolab, of the executive orders, of Chris Monroe.
Appendix C, the questions from the floor — the seven analyst questions isolated from the prepared remarks, each with what was asked, who answered, and what the answer reached. The distinction is evidential: a figure volunteered under no pressure and a figure conceded under questioning are not the same kind of record. The appendix closes on what was asked and not answered — a date for median gate fidelity at 256, the fiscal 2027 split between core IonQ and SkyWater, and the range of lithography nodes SkyWater works across.
Appendix D, the figures index — fifty-five figures of consequence spoken from the stage, grouped into revenue and transaction figures, technical and scale figures, manufacturing figures, dated commitments, and record figures. Each gives the figure as spoken, what it was attached to, and the turn. Third-party numbers are marked as such and are not IonQ’s claims. The fourth group is the one to carry forward: those are the entries that can be checked against a future quarter.
The indexes are meant to be used together. A subject in Appendix A gives the turns; a name in Appendix B narrows to the mention; Appendix C shows whether the point survived questioning; Appendix D gives the number attached to it and the date, if one was given.
Contents
Front Matter
How to Use This Record 2
About This Transcript 5
How It Is Organized 5
Part I — The Event in Speaking Order 5
Speaker Key 5
Part II — The Proceedings, Grouped by Speaker 33
Inder Singh 33
John Martinis (pre-recorded) 38
Promotional video 39
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 39
Dr. Chris Ballance 43
Tom Sonderman, SkyWater 47
Jordan Shapiro 49
John McPeak, Rosenblatt Securities 52
Nihal Choksi, Northland 52
Gary Mobley, StoneX 52
Analyst (unidentified) 52
Quinn Bolton, Needham 52
Craig Ellis, B. Riley 53
Vijay Rakesh, Mizuho 53
Mihir Bhaskar 53
Alan Ho, Qolab 56
Chad Sakac 56
John Lokada, ServiceNow 58
Robert Long, EPB 59
Dr. Matthew Rabinowitz, Natera / MyOme 59
Alessio Butti, Italy 60
Gen. John W. Raymond, IonQ Board 61
Robert Cardillo, IonQ Board / former NGA 61
Rick Muller, IonQ / formerly Sandia & IARPA 63
Part III — Presentation Materials: Status and Speaker Map 65
Appendix A — The Subject Digest 66
Appendix B — Names, Products and Programs 86
Appendix C — The Questions From the Floor 88
Appendix D — Figures and Dated Commitments 90
Page numbers verified against the rendered document.
Part II — The Proceedings, Grouped by Speaker
The same words, reordered so that each person can be read end to end. Nothing here is new relative to Part I; the value is in continuity of voice. A reader tracking one executive’s account across a three-hour event — Ballance on the roadmap, Sonderman on the fab, Singh on the numbers — will find it faster here, and the speaker examinations published separately were built from this ordering.
Inder Singh
Inder Singh 0:00 – 3:08
Come on in, folks. Wow, what a turnout. Amazing. Thank you all. We appreciate your interest. We appreciate your attending the session today. We appreciate your, if you’re investors and your trust in what we’re trying to execute here as a company, and if you’re an analyst, we appreciate you following us as well. My name is Inder Singh.
I joined Niccolò, our CEO, in the journey of making IonQ not only the pace setter of the industry that he’s made it, but also the only platform company in our space. My job today is to show this slide, which is a legal slide, but also really to show you the agenda. We have an exciting day planned, really an afternoon planned for you.
It’s in two parts. On the left hand side, you’ll hear from a number of the leaders of the company about how we’re doing and how we’re executing, what our plans are, what our priorities are, and how we plan to keep on innovating in each of these areas, whether it’s in computing, in the security area, and a number of things, frankly, that three years ago people thought were like three decades away.
And here we are, it’s real. And when we say quantum is now, we mean it. You have customers that will be joining on the right hand side, as you see, a number of panels to tell you what they’re focused on, how they’re using either the security solution from us or the computing solution from us or imaging from space using AI.
Amazing things are actually happening. I moved from the board into the company a year ago, actually this month, and the first analyst day was one week after I joined. This is the second analyst day. We have so much more to tell. Let me tell you that members of our board are also here in this row. Kindly raise your hand.
And we’re thrilled to have them. It shows you the engagement of the company, it shows the engagement of the board, and the importance that we place on making sure that every one of our constituencies — customers, investors, partners, board — are all involved. And so I’m not going to give a long speech here. Essentially, all I wanted to do was tell you we think we have a lot of excitement to hear about, and opportunities for networking at the end of the day.
Your tags have a certain color on them. It will just determine which of the two rooms you’ll be going to, and some of you may be actually going to help ring the bell as well. I’ve done that a number of times. I may or may not join you in that endeavor, as some analysts have asked me to do some Q&A with them instead. So welcome, thank you.
If you have questions, of course, we’ll have — please make sure that the funds from Washington to Wall Street is
Inder Singh 47:01 – 1:08:00
Thank you very, very much, Jordan. I spent several years of my career being a Wall Street analyst, and I remember the things that I used to look at. I used to look at the company’s technology. Does it have a roadmap? Does it have the investment dollars? Does it have staying power? Does it have positioning? But also, I used to look at the management team.
Do I believe, do I trust they can execute? Do they have a track record of execution? And I hope what you saw here today was a management team that has that. You know, when I joined Niccolò in this mission to help make this platform company into the pace setter that he’s made it — I take no credit for that — and also how much more we can accomplish here together as a team, he’s pulled together an amazing team.
And I’m hoping that through the rest of the day, you’ll see more and more of that. And I think the investor confidence that you will see will inspire you as well. When I joined the board of this company, and some of the board members are here, we used to be a one-product company. We were in quantum computing. It’s a wonderful market.
It’s not my TAM number, but a hundred and forty-eight billion dollar TAM according to third parties. So every other quantum company that you are looking at, virtually every other quantum company, is in that TAM. It’s an attractive TAM. We are already the pace setter. You’ve heard from Chris Ballance earlier about how we continue to innovate.
He talked about the 256 chip and the 10K chip, and it doesn’t stop there. So we’re happy to be in that market. We are the pace setter in that market. We don’t intend to stop. We spent a billion dollars, roughly, on Oxford Ionics and another two billion almost on SkyWater. So we’ve put in more than many governments have put into quantum to actually make it happen and make it real.
I’m thrilled to say also, though, we’re in many other TAMs, and I think you heard that from the speakers today. In quantum networking, which Jordan just talked about, we had a wonderful customer in the Air Force Research Laboratory. They benefited from us in terms of what we created for them, and then we learned from them, as you said, how to network two machines together, either next to each other or at distance.
We also realized that as a responsible company, if we are creating machines that are so powerful that they go beyond what humanity has ever seen before — and by the way, when I joined, I never thought we’d be here this fast — but if you’re creating machines that can, as you heard, break encryption, you have to be responsible.
You have to actually make sure that you’re also providing security. So Niccolò, in his vision of creating the mission of the company and the vision for the company as he saw it when he became CEO beginning of last year, decided it was important to have quantum cybersecurity. Very different game than any cybersecurity you’ve seen so far, protecting against a quantum computer.
We got into sensing. Certain government customers value the fact that you have sensing that doesn’t get jammed. You’ve all heard about GPS getting jammed. You’ve all heard about how planes are walked off and land in the wrong place. Bad things happen. That technology has become available broadly and is being used in conflicts more and more.
So having things that are very accurate and precise, as you just heard, but also that cannot be jammed — we wanted to bring that to the table too. And then, as I look at kind of the most important part that we just announced recently, which is making it all secure. Manufacturing it in a way where the quantum products we create — and over time we’ll do more and more with SkyWater, but computing to begin with — make it secure from design to engineering to manufacturing to delivery to the customer.
They need to be able to trust it. And that’s what a trusted fab brings for us. That’s why it’s worth having Tom and his entire team, who’ve done this over years and years, and have done it well, and know how to scale, help us build the most powerful devices in every one of these categories. I haven’t got a TAM up there for SkyWater.
It’s new. It’s a huge TAM. It’s the — and you heard Tom describe it — the only quantum foundry at scale in the world. In the world. And so we’re glad we use it. We’re glad that others in the industry are using it as well. You know, we don’t talk about it much, but we sell components to other quantum computing companies that depend on us already to help them make what they’re trying to make.
In addition, we also manufacture some of what they need in the SkyWater quantum foundry. So we intend to keep doing that. You know, the adversary for us isn’t another company. It’s a nation state probably, or more nation states, right? Protecting against what quantum can do, both good and bad. As I think about the track record, remember I said a real important part is, does the team execute?
Do they say something and then do it? Do they beat what they said they would do? And this company has a track record of doing that. I joined when it was about two million in revenue. And one machine and thirty people and a dream. And over the years that you see here through 2024, you can see the results for yourselves.
It’s not big numbers yet, right? But it’s actually demonstrating customers are buying what this company is creating. Last year, when Niccolò became CEO, we accelerated that. Yes, we acquired some companies, they brought some revenue, but as we’ve said every earnings call, we keep investing in the computing as well and make sure that stays our fastest growing engine, and we’re thrilled that it’s still driving a lot of our growth, and we’re thrilled that we have actually a portfolio of things that we can sell to a customer.
And now, we have SkyWater. This morning, we issued guidance for what we think SkyWater will add to our P&L for the rest of this year. It’s a stub year. We got approval on July 31st, a couple days before earnings, and so we were thrilled, and it happened in the timeline we said it would happen. We were thrilled to have that.
We didn’t provide guidance at that time on our earnings call because it was just too recent. Today, we gave you some more color on it, and I’ll share some additional color now. The point is end-to-end quantum everything. Think of this company as the one-stop shop for quantum, not just computing — yes, computing of course — but when we talk to customers, sometimes they start with, "I need your security first," and more and more I’m hearing that, more and more Niccolò is hearing that, more and more Chad in the back is hearing that, and you’ll hear from some customers that talk about that too.
But we have a strategy to land and expand, so it doesn’t matter where the discussion starts. There’s a question of how many of your products they use. When we think about quantum computing, I think of two things. One is the computing power. I came from Arm. Arm makes efficient processors and computers. We are increasing from the Aria to the Superion 10K, our qubit system count four hundred times.
Four hundred times. This isn’t taking it out to the two million machine one day, right? That’s further out. I told my team, no, no, no, no, stop. Let’s go with a couple of years of actuals of what we’ve done. You can see those there. Three years of machines that we’ve put into the market and two that are about to come into the market.
And on the right-hand side, equally important, we can deliver the lowest cost per qubit. So the most amount of compute power at the lowest power. Anyone remember Moore’s Law? This is quantum Moore’s Law. We also have machines that don’t require a grid — it’s not on the chart — it plugs into the wall. So you don’t have to buy a nuclear power reactor to run the machine.
We are privileged and proud now to have SkyWater and IonQ come together as one company called IonQ. Welcome to Tom and the entire team. Some of you are in the back there. Thrilled to have you here. This team now can go end to end — secure, trusted fab. And SkyWater is the only trusted fab of scale in the United States.
Others will follow. There have been announcements. Others will do it too. Those others have said they’ll get it done by 2029, perhaps, maybe a year early, I don’t know. But I think where we are, and our goal is just to keep running faster and faster and faster and have the capital to do that, we think we continue to pace the market, as I said at the beginning.
We will give you color below those two categories. We will provide you on the left-hand side, as you can see, what we’re doing in quantum hardware and in quantum services. What’s on the left in quantum hardware is the computers we sell on premises to a customer, and we’re selling more and more of those. I’m seeing those happen in hybrid deployments, an AI factory with a GPU next to it.
On the right is quantum services. What’s in there? The applications, the things that run on the quantum computer, as well as QCaaS. So if someone doesn’t want a machine, they just want cloud access to the machine, we do that too. And that’s actually growing faster than the computing business even, and is even more profitable than many of the things we do.
I’m thrilled to have that business. I’m thrilled to see the growth that’s happening in that business. To the right, we’ll provide some color on SkyWater going forward in those two buckets that you see there. SEMI semiconductor foundry — think of what SkyWater used to call its Texas foundry. That is principally the Texas foundry.
And the quantum foundry and advanced technologies is where we manufacture our quantum computing devices and the chips that you saw that are in the room there, as well as some of the most advanced things that only SkyWater can do for government customers over time that are cleared to work on secret projects, things that you don’t have a clearance to know, things that go boom and other things I’m not going to get into.
This gives you a sense of the things that are in there. I’m not going to break out this level of granularity on our earnings calls, but I want you to have a slide that shows you where’s your computer, where’s your QCaaS, and on the right, where’s the quantum foundry, where’s the advanced packaging that SkyWater used to talk about.
I’m simplifying the number of categories that SkyWater had to a few, just as on the left I’ve given you color in terms of how we’re doing internationally, commercially, et cetera. We might do that on the SkyWater side. It’s early days still. But the point is to have a limited number of things that you all can follow that make sense to you, and you can hold us accountable for.
It’s also important for us to demonstrate what happens when you take the consensus numbers for SkyWater, which is on the left, the six hundred and eight million dollars. That is the consensus that existed on July 30th, the day before the closing, and then on our second-quarter earnings call, for those of you who listened, I said of their revenue, a hundred and twenty million comes from us.
You see that on that left-hand chart. The bar in the middle is the results that SkyWater already reported for the first quarter and the second quarter. And frankly, an estimate for July still. They didn’t report their third quarter, clearly. So 368 from the 608 is what they’ve delivered by our estimation. These are unaudited results, so take them with that appropriate caveat.
On the right, therefore, is what’s left. So for the five months that we will have owned them this year, they’ll have delivered two hundred and forty million dollars of revenue to us, of which, by the way, seventy million is from us, right? So I have to eliminate that at the corporate level. I think you all understand that.
But the bridge was important for you to see that, again, they’re not guided for the year, so I use street consensus, results delivered, what we all see in our P&L. When I take that 240 and then I add it to the guidance we’ve already given you for IonQ previously, the 280 to 290 million range, which we reaffirmed this morning — and as you know, the color we gave under that around organic growth and other things like that when we had our Q2 call, you can refer back to the Q2 transcript.
I’m not reaffirming all the granular details, of course, but in the press release this morning, we affirmed the 280 to 290, plus the 240 from SkyWater that I just showed you, minus the 70 million elimination of revenue because as we now own them, gives you the 450 to 460 million range. Wanted to make sure that you had that granularity a month into basically our having gone through it.
There’s still some purchase-price types of adjustments we’ll be doing, some noise-level things. But as I look at the business and I look at this, this gives us a solid foundation for all the things we have to do in our strategy. And the financials that both SkyWater’s delivering in terms of revenue and we’re delivering — I don’t want to call it legacy, actually the future IonQ — is pretty amazing, both sides of it, and we’re happy to have them as part of the fold.
Over time, we will focus on other things like EBITDA, and we’ll give you more color on EBITDA. One month in, I can’t give you that level of color. When we report earnings and the auditors have gone through all the numbers, we’ll be sharing more. We will continue to invest. Why? Because we are the pace setter in quantum.
We are the pace setter. The industry is moving. We’re happy they’re moving. We need the industry to emerge. One company doesn’t an industry make. So we want the others to also succeed in their endeavors. They’re still in that first ten I was talking about, remember? We’re the only one-roof provider. Later, some have called it the Amazon of this.
I like to think of it as the Cisco of quantum. I worked at Cisco. It’s like put the things together that work together. We’re also addressing multiple markets, important for you to remember. As you think about us, you can pigeonhole us into a one-product company, but you’ll be missing a big chunk of actually what we’re delivering.
The value to customers sometimes can be security. And security can open the door to a conversation that leads to compute use cases. Not everybody will buy sensing, mind you. That’s a national-security customer probably. But we’re catering for everyone. We are also, and I put it here, in products that some of which have really attractive margins.
And our goal as a company, and Niccolò and I as leaders, is to ensure that over time we drive EBITDA margins higher. Gross margin, some of you asked me about, and gross margin sometimes doesn’t always capture that, so we talk about revenue and EBITDA margin, because that captures R&D and a bunch of other things. We spend more on R&D probably than most of our peers.
I won’t say combined, but most of our peers. We’re also delivering quantum solutions, and you heard that a little bit from Jordan as well. Over the last couple of quarters and earnings calls, both Niccolò and I have talked to you about we don’t just sell products, we actually make products work together and sell a solution.
A Vector Atomic clock on a space platform is one of those solutions. Using quantum computing to improve the imaging from a SAR satellite is another one, and there are many more. So the proof points of the strategy that we had are now starting to flow in announcements, and the companies that I’ve followed over the years and worked with over the years turn those into revenues and customers over time.
We do have the strongest balance sheet. Our intent is to keep the balance sheet the strongest balance sheet required for success
— not too strong, certainly not too weak. I told you we spend more on quantum computing alone than entire governments do. Think about our entire portfolio. We’ll be investing in all of that. So Niccolò and I, and the leadership team, and the board will make sure that we have the ability to fund our innovation for many years to come.
I want to make sure that we have cash flow available to us to be able to invest for multiple years, so we don’t have to worry about that. That’s how you make long-term strategy come alive and deliver short-term results. And with our partners at SkyWater, we now have the only trusted fab and the only quantum fab in the world.
Others are following our strategy, and they will follow us. We won’t stop running. We’re going to be the pace setter. You have been the pace setter, and the management team that you have, and you saw here, are very focused on that. In each category, everything that they talked about, they intend to keep investing, failing fast if it’s not working.
Having SkyWater allows us to do multiple prototypes at one time. Others can’t do that. So we find out which one works and which one doesn’t much more quickly. So a number of things come together under this platform. Not going to say that it’s all easy. Lots of execution is required. Technology innovation at the frontier of technology isn’t easy, but if you’re asking yourself what comes after AI, quantum comes after AI.
If you’re thinking can quantum work with AI, we’re making it happen today in hybrid solutions. So the thing that was — Niccolò said this at the beginning — the thing that was out in the 2030s or beyond in people’s minds is here, almost as close as your nose. Not quite. Almost. So we will keep investing to make sure this works.
I remember studying quantum mechanics in engineering school, and I’m not sure I understood everything, and it wasn’t a good company, and I understand that you wouldn’t understand everything. It’s okay. I don’t understand how spacetime curvature happens, but gravity exists. Elon Musk has built a rocket to overcome gravity.
We’re building machines that use quantum mechanics, and you don’t have to be a quantum physicist to invest in a quantum company. We wanted to have some Q&A. I probably went a few minutes over, but if my colleagues can join me, that would be great. Now if we run out of time during the bell-ringing ceremony, if you still have questions, I’ll be available to answer detailed questions as well.
Inder Singh 1:12:19 – 1:13:02
And Chris and I, when we did the Oxford acquisition, we’ll remember this, but there are other foundries that were trying to be quantum foundries also, and we talked to one of them — I won’t name them — and they couldn’t move fast enough. They didn’t quite understand what we needed. They didn’t have a learning curve on quantum.
Hadn’t done quantum before. They told us if — they were blown away by the volume numbers we were talking about into the future years, and they needed permission from the mothership, and they just move too slowly. So one is like rapid prototyping and getting things done in months. The other is no one else can really match it right now.
Great, thank you.
Inder Singh 1:18:35 – 1:19:06
So you’ll get more today shortly. And we intend to keep investing, obviously, in the quantum foundry. Yeah, Mihir will talk about it a lot more. But from a capital standpoint, we bring capital to the table that SkyWater needs to grow its quantum foundry. Again, I don’t think of the others as competitors that are in that foundry.
They’re part of the industry and the ecosystem that’s going to exist in the future. They’re already our customers in some ways. And this accelerating our roadmap and our learning curve helps, frankly, the other players as well.
Inder Singh 1:22:07 – 1:22:42
And for us, it’s a great — I mean, we have not had to go into the Texas fab to do quantum, but there’s optionality. When Niccolò and I were looking at the acquisition, this is one of the things I went into the calculus of: do we need to have more than one fab? Right now, it’s being done in Minnesota, and Florida may be the next logical area to do the advanced packaging.
I think Fab 25 to your question is like optionality that if you needed to use it for something else, you could. Of course, you’d have to retool it. So far, we haven’t.
Inder Singh 1:28:56 – 1:30:37
So on pricing, obviously I’m not going to go into a lot of detail in terms of pricing, but you can think about it as a candy jar of opportunity for us, right? We are lowering our own cost, starting with the lowest cost to begin with, and over the next few years, we need to make strategic decisions about how much of that margin we want to keep and share with our customers, right?
At the moment, by the time that Niccolò and I or any of the folks on this floor or around the room get to a customer, it’s not a competitive situation most of the time. They’ve picked their modality already. They’re going to choose this or this. It starts to become like a value story. What can you do for me? Use cases.
And we forward-deploy engineers, forward-deploy app developers to go from their cost side of their equation to the revenue side of their equation. When you do that, it stops being a price discussion. We also meet the customer where they are. If they don’t want to buy the computer and the entire computer, we sell them QCaaS if that’s what they want.
There are things you can do with one that you can’t do with the other. So I know I’m avoiding your question. There isn’t another company with a 256 chip out there, period. For sure, there’s nothing known with ten thousand. And the number of logical qubits that’ll be delivered because of the ion-trap technology just gives us an inherent advantage.
So as we map out our next five years and think about investing for the next five years, absolutely, we’re laser focused on ensuring that we deliver total cost of ownership advantage for the customer and then margin expansion for us. Did I successfully dodge that pricing question?
John Martinis (pre-recorded)
John Martinis (pre-recorded) 3:08 – 3:08
racing
John Martinis (pre-recorded) 1:37:17 – 1:39:27
I’m John Martinis. I’m the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Qolab. I’ve been working on superconducting quantum bits way back from inception. I was a co-developer of qubit technology in the 1980s, and I’ve been excited to see the transition from a fundamental physics experiment to something that we want to make useful in the next few years.
I think we’re entering a new phase of quantum computing. We have most of the science understood, but I think right now what we’re trying to do is figure out how to go from that to build a manufacturable system and a system that works better, scaled up, build a useful quantum computer. And I think that transition is going to happen if scientists like myself, people in Qolab start collaborating with people in the manufacturing space, especially those who are doing semiconductor kind of fabrication.
In particular, we’re really happy working with SkyWater because they’re used to doing specialized fabrication and working to develop these new processes to overcome all the materials demands and processing demands. We’re very excited that IonQ acquired SkyWater and are helping with extra focus to work on quantum computing, and we think that that’s a very good partnership and acquisition, and it helps SkyWater be able to focus build new capabilities in their fabrication to properly scale up quantum computers and build them properly.
So I very much look forward to working with the SkyWater team to not just simply build a better and bigger quantum computer, but lay the industrial foundation for a new era of computing. So thank you very much.
Promotional video
Promotional video 3:08 – 4:40
towards quantum. Where does America stand in the race for quantum advantage? It’s already here. Computing, medicine, and security that will one day be a matter of the past. Today, everyone’s talking about quantum. We’re building it. IonQ leads quantum computing, networking, sensing. Trusted US manufacturing, faster innovation, a stronger foundation for long term national security and economic competition.
The recent US executive orders made one thing clear: the world needs a competitive quantum ecosystem. The future of quantum won’t build itself. We’re here to do our part. SkyWater and IonQ ushering in the next frontier of quantum innovation. Give
Niccolò de Masi, CEO
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 4:40 – 18:27
us a round of applause, at least. It took us seven months to get that deal closed, and it is hugely historic, and I’m excited about the fact that we are not only the largest quantum company in history, but we’re the first one that is vertically integrated. And so I’m going to start my bit of this presentation talking about the phases of IonQ’s growth.
I’d be remiss, however, before doing so, if I don’t thank everyone that’s worked so hard to make today possible. Whether or not you’re in our IR function or our comms function or events team or product marketing team, this is slated to be easily our most exciting corporate event to date. It’s our biggest one. And if you’re watching at home, it’s a packed house where we had to turn people away, in all seriousness.
And so next year, if you get a seat, you can probably scalp it and make a fortune out front of the NYSE. We have a hugely distinguished, and eclectic, and frankly powerful group in the audience today, and I’m really honored by everybody who traveled today. We have not only distinguished university professors, and we’ll hear from some of them later on.
We have our founder in the audience, but we also have our friends from overseas who’ve traveled quite some ways to make it here. We have founders of public companies whose market caps are larger than ours at the moment. We have a hereditary prince from Europe. We also have a former ambassador and a former governor. And of course, we are honored that Senator Alessio Butti is here with us, and we’ll be hearing some more from him later this afternoon.
So let’s talk about the era that IonQ is announcing as having entered today. You’ve heard me in prior events talk about the fact that we built the world’s first and biggest quantum platform over the last couple of years, and you can see how our revenue has grown on an annual basis approximately. This year, even before SkyWater closed, we were on track to do the better part of three hundred million dollars of quantum platform revenue.
And SkyWater’s merger with us marks the beginning of a historic era for IonQ and for our industry. Not only are we investing in driving merchant supply to accelerate the US industry and our allies, but we’re also speeding up our own roadmap because of this vertical integration. We are focused as a company on these four areas in our platform: computing, security, sensing, and of course also our foundry, which is a new part of the family.
You’re going to hear a lot about our foundry capabilities this afternoon from my colleagues, not just Mihir Bhaskar, but Tom Sonderman, who runs SkyWater to this day. And you’re going to hear about application progress, not just from ourselves, but from our customers. We have done what we said we were going to do in the last year, and we’ve continued to deliver not just technical milestones, but commercial milestones that unlock applications that are hugely exciting.
Now, this page, I have to be honest, it’s my favorite one, and I am hugely proud of the fact that over the last two years, we have worked as a team to scale our company and deliver a quantum platform that has a unique depth, breadth, and scale advantage not seen anywhere else in the industry. We do about — before SkyWater, we did about twice the revenue of the whole rest of the sector that’s public in Q2.
And we’re obviously not stopping here. Andrew’s going to talk a bit later about our guidance uplift for the day, and you can see that IonQ will continue to outperform quarter on quarter as we have done since our IPO. A lot of work goes into revenue, and I don’t want to underplay this because we’re an industry that’s always pioneering, always delivering technical milestones, but that’s just the beginning of it, right?
To have revenue, you’ve got to have a technical milestone that’s hit, a product that works, a customer that buys it, and of course machines that are delivered that do useful things. We’ve been doing that longer than anyone in our sector. We continue to do it, and we’re doing it, of course, at an accelerating rate. For those of you who haven’t seen it, this is a big news day for us.
We put out six press releases. Now, during the course of the day, you’re going to hear about each one of them. Some of the things that I’m proudest of is not just the fact that we’ve quintupled our revenue year on year, and not just the fact that we launched the world’s first fault tolerant architecture that’s shovel ready — our Walking Cat paper in April — and not just that we’re in three
DARPA programs, HARK, About Time, and of course QBI, but we’ve done exciting things on the interconnect and the networking front also.
And we’ll touch on that, just like we’ll touch on what we’re doing with error correction and fidelity, when Dr. Ballance speaks just after me. Now I’m going to talk for a second about our security organization and then move on to computing. We’ve been passionate believers in the need for quantum security for years now, and we have the largest security practice.
My colleague Jordan Shapiro will talk a bit later about this. But things are accelerating here, and not just accelerating because of the industry as a whole. They’re accelerating because of course what IonQ has done and announced this morning. I said this a year ago: Q-Day is coming. And it’s coming sooner than people think, and it’s coming inside the planning horizon of a CISO, whether or not you are in a government position, federal position, or an enterprise one.
Classical AI is accelerating this trend and playing into it. So some of you might have seen that Anthropic’s had a lab leak, OpenAI’s had a lab leak, and Claude is going to town on some of the recommended PQC algorithms that are out there. This isn’t going to slow down as the theme. So if you are a CISO and you’re watching today, you have got to get ahead of this.
IonQ offers defense in depth. We offer hardware and software solutions. We think this is going to be a race that accelerates and one that demands ever more investment to stay ahead of, because the combination of what quantum computers in the wrong hands and classical LLMs in the wrong hands can do is only going to make this trickier.
So please call us. As they always say, you want a safe cracker to be the one who builds your safe. We’ve delivered this morning some news on the safe-breaking front, if you will. You want to be working with us on the safe-making front, and we offer unique defense-in-depth advantages for that. Moving now to our computing business, it’s been a big year.
You can just see how many systems we have deployed on-premise. You can see how many hours of uptime and computing that we’ve delivered through the cloud and how many customers we now have around the world. And this is a map that we are delivering to, servicing customers on, and of course doing better every generation to deliver customer satisfaction.
That’s now a big part of the lexicon, just like manufacturing, upgradability, and accessibility is. We’ve been on the cloud since 2020
— Amazon, Google, Microsoft. We are generally the biggest cloud partners in the quantum space, and we expect this business to remain exciting, high margin, growing quickly. Now, Chris is going to talk a lot more about our roadmap, but hopefully you all had a chance to walk by our models out front, our actual models, our actual chips out front of our generations of systems.
What makes IonQ different is that we’ve been running for over five years in the cloud, we’ve been shipping systems for over five years, and our machines turned on in 2017. And so we have real applications in production today, we have more of them rolling out continually, and we of course were the first company to publish a complete fault-tolerant shovel-ready blueprint in April, which we’re building upon today.
My colleague Mihir is going to talk in a few minutes about progress that we’ve made also in the networking space, and we think not just about the next two or three quarters. Next two or three years at IonQ, we talk about the next five years, seven years, and we see a huge opportunity for not just our machines to become more powerful in their own right, but an opportunity for us to deliver data-center-scale quantum computers.
And we’re doing this through progress in our photonic unit and progress through our quantum networking, quantum memory business that we acquired with Lightsynq last year. This quantum application roadmap we rolled out last June, and I’m excited to announce that we continue to march right along. We are unlocking all the applications that we said we would last year, and you’ve seen these announcements, whether it’s computational engineering, whether it’s logistics, whether or not it’s image change detection, whether it’s in the pharmaceutical space.
We continue marching right up the curve year after year, and we believe we’re just scratching the tip of the iceberg here. There will be far more applications than we can think of in advance as our machines roll out, and far more exciting applications we hope will be created by people building businesses and doing research with our machines at arm’s length.
Special call out for our life sciences colleagues. This is something near and dear to our hearts at IonQ. We care about oncology, we care about predictive medicine, we care about personalized medicine, and we’ll be talking a little bit more about that later on today. But obviously in terms of what quantum computers are great at, modeling quantum mechanical things like materials and pharma is something that is a superpower of ours.
In April, we rolled out our Walking Cat architecture, and we’re proud of the fact that it was shovel ready and done down to a level of detail the world had never seen before. This morning, we announced that an IonQ system with about twenty thousand physical qubits could recover a two hundred and fifty-six bit elliptical curve key.
We didn’t approximate. We’ve done this down to a level of detail that is historic. We’ve done it in a responsible way, in partnership with our nation’s government, and we’ve done it because we want to show people that the blocking and tackling, belt and braces approach we’ve taken for thirty years now since our company was founded continues to deliver results that are real, on schedule, and with huge implications for sectors like chemistry, materials science, and of course the life sciences.
I don’t know about you guys, but for most of my time in the quantum computing space, I remember a lecture of mine when I was in university, and I read Chris Monroe’s paper in ’95, ’94, the first quantum logic gate. And physicists tend to talk about superpowers. We talk about the superpowers that quantum computing can deliver.
Those superpowers are beginning to roll out. And IonQ has a super team, and they’ve done super work with our super ions this year. And so without further ado, I’m going to close on our final announcement from this morning, which is that we’ve rolled out our new quantum computing platform line of products, which we’ve aptly named the Superion systems and the Superion line, and we believe that that’s appropriate because they are going to be the world’s most powerful machines.
Pretty much every generation, I think, will be more powerful per unit dollar, per unit energy consumption, per unit space, probably in some cases by orders of magnitude that you’ll find anywhere else in the world. It’s a system that is upgradable, a system that’s accessible through the cloud and through sovereign systems, and best of all, it’s a system that’s all been accelerated and all gone onto the SkyWater chips that we now fully integrate with, and our friend Tom Sonderman runs.
So I’m going to show you this quick little video on Superion, and I’m going to hand this off to Dr. Chris Ballance to tell you a bit more about it. We’re here to make these machines mass market. So we’re focused on building our ecosystem, expanding our ecosystem, and delivering these machines at an access point, price point, power consumption point, manufacturable space consumption point that hopefully every company, every government in the world can invest in, because of the fact that we do what we say we’re going to do at IonQ, and we tell you the next generation of systems will roll out, and we’ll go from two, fifty-six to ten K to twenty K, two hundred K.
We will do that, and we have done it for the last thirty years. We’ve done it for the last ten years as a private company, and we’re doing it the last five or six years as a public company. So put your hands together for Dr. Chris Ballance, who’s now going to tell us a lot more about this roadmap. Thank you for your time.
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 1:08:04 – 1:08:06
Okay. I think this is the first victim.
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 1:18:30 – 1:18:34
There’s a section on quantum foundry and networking actually when we’re done here.
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 1:27:29 – 1:27:36
Right, let’s have Mihir answer the Nexus question, because he’s the next presenter and he’s going to answer a little more of these questions even in depth.
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 1:30:39 – 1:31:00
All right. So Inder will be around during the bell-ringing ceremony, and we’ll be back for reception right afterwards, and I’ll be there also. So I want to thank you all for your questions. I’m sure there’s many more to come later on, and we’ll make sure we answer those. I’d like to move on now to hear Bhaskar, who’s going to talk about our quantum foundry, and more on integrated photonics.
Yep. Thank you, Niccolò, and thank you,
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 2:00:02 – 2:01:45
Okay. This is going to be insightful. We’ve got some wonderful panelists who are making their way up the stage here. John Lokada is the Futures Director of ServiceNow, my friend at the end. Robert Long is the President of Strategic Initiatives at EPB, and Dr. Matthew Rabinowitz probably doesn’t need introduction. He is not only a very successful serial entrepreneur in the aeronautics space, but also in the AI space and the pharmaceutical biotech sector.
He’s the founder and Executive Chairman of Natera. Most of us in the room, if you’ve had children, probably use their product. So we’re going to have a pretty exciting discussion here, and I’d love to start with maybe each of you giving us your perspectives on which part of the IonQ platform is most relevant to your businesses, most exciting, because there is a range of time horizons that you’ve each been working on.
EPB is one of our largest, closest, and most historic partners. You guys have a computer, you have a network, you’re running your own applications, your own algorithms, as you just heard from Chad. ServiceNow, you’re thinking about what the next year or two brings. And of course Dr. Rabinowitz is smack in the middle of how quantum computing can actually make a difference for humanity and for the human condition.
So you maybe want to start with John and go down the line?
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 2:07:02 – 2:08:06
So each of you has been a visionary and leader in this sector. Janet at EPB and her predecessor used to analogize being early to quantum the same way you guys thought about being early to the fastest fiber network in the country. Dr. Rabinowitz almost
grabbed my lapel at an event we were both at and said, I want to be five years ahead of all my competitors in all of these areas you’ve mentioned.
It was very memorable because this is a man who is not only a polymath and R&D researcher of the year actually in ’24, but also a capitalist. And I always like to say that IonQ — that’s who we are. We are a physicist, but we are a capitalist. So I’d love to understand how you’ve each thought — and John, same thing, you led the quantum initiative at ServiceNow across the board for quite some time — how are you thinking about extending your leadership positions in your sectors?
Because you can see that things are just inflecting, but whether it’s security or computing, this is really just a race that’s in its first inning.
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 2:18:54 – 2:18:58
Okay, wonderful. Well, I appreciate the partnership, gentlemen. Any final remarks?
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 2:19:59 – 2:21:30
Thank you so much, gentlemen. Appreciate the partnership. Many more great moments and events together. Okay, so we’re going to move on, and I’m going to introduce our guest keynote speaker for today. It is a truly great honor to welcome Undersecretary Alessio Butti. He’s been one of the leading voices behind Italy’s digital and technological transformation under Giorgia Meloni’s leadership, the longest-serving government I think Italy’s had since the war.
Under his leadership, the Department of Digital Transformation has played a central role in advancing Italy’s national quantum strategy and supporting Italy’s ambition to become a leading hub in Europe for quantum innovation. Undersecretary Butti has been an important bridge between the US and Italy, fostering stronger transatlantic ties in technology innovation and investment.
He’s been a strong advocate of collaboration between government, industry, and the research community, and he has brought together Italian scientific excellence and American technological leadership. It’s therefore particularly fitting to welcome him here today to the New York Stock Exchange as we look forward to a new chapter of technological cooperation between our two countries.
Please join me in welcoming Italy’s Undersecretary of State for Technological Innovation, Senator Alessio Butti.
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 2:27:33 – 2:30:46
Okay, so we’ve got an exciting announcement now that follows on the Undersecretary’s kind welcome and attendance today. Marco Pistoia runs IonQ Italia, and over the last few weeks and months we’ve struck up a fantastic partnership with a business called Lutech that is run by our friend Giuseppe here. And we’re announcing today — this will go out in the news I think tomorrow morning before market open — that there is now a partnership between IonQ Italia and Lutech for the nation’s go-to-market of all of IonQ’s quantum platforms.
So we thank the Undersecretary for his sponsorship, we thank Giuseppe for his incredible partnership, and we thank of course Marco for being the gel on all of this. Congratulations, gentlemen. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Marco. Okay, we are onto our final panel here, which is in the national-security space.
So I’d love to invite my colleagues up. General Raymond is to my left. He serves on the board of IonQ and other public companies and institutions. He is the founder of the Space Force under the first Trump administration, and the only four-star general to be a four-star in two services since the Air Force was founded in 1947.
So we’re honored to have General Raymond on our board, and he’s been a tremendous supporter of our mission. Robert Cardillo, also a board member and now board observer at IonQ, was the former director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and he has been a vital supporter of our insights in that community. Rick Muller led the quantum program at Sandia National Labs for I think twenty-two years — you’ll correct me, slightly fewer, twenty-one — and then he became the director of IARPA before he joined IonQ about twelve, eighteen months ago.
So we’re closing the day discussing our nation’s government and our allies and the perspective of these three gentlemen who have served our nation to a tremendous extent at a very high level, to discuss everything from quantum security through to the relevance of quantum computing on the continuation of your mission. Maybe we’ll start with General Raymond.
Would love each of you to tell us how we fit into your life service as well as obviously what drew you to IonQ.
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 2:37:13 – 2:37:39
Rick’s the only one of the four of us that has a PhD in ion trapping, but Robert and Jay have run much larger organizations, and I’ve appreciated their counsel and mentoring on how to do a good job of that as we continue scaling. I’d love, General, if you’d share some team-building examples if you have a moment as pertains to where you think quantum is.
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 2:41:28 – 2:41:46
Well, thank you. So look, just on that theme, and we got time for our last question here: sovereignty, trust, zero trust, obviously domestic supply chains, executive orders. Rick, do you have any comments on that? And then of course Robert and Jay would love you to take us home with your closing thoughts as well.
Niccolò de Masi, CEO 2:45:40 – 2:49:09
It has been an overwhelming privilege to watch our team grow, watch our team perform, and watch our company not just scale, but hit technical milestones as we promised, and as importantly, I would argue even more importantly, hit our commercial milestones, time and time again. You have seen us now for twenty, twenty-five quarters in a row be able to do that.
I always jokingly say we can chew gum and walk at the same time. We can hit our technical milestones, but also our commercial milestones. And you’ve seen us build very thoughtfully the world’s first quantum platform. You’ve seen us become fully integrated. You’ve seen us grow our merchant supply business decisively this year.
We not only supply to the leading players in the quantum ecosystem, in the friendly world, things like atomic clocks, which are the most accurate in the world. You can see we’ve built multimodal networking, and we’ve led at that for a long time. Chris Monroe’s been at it a long time, Mihir Bhaskar’s been at it a long time, and together we have the leading team that I believe will underwrite not just our success in a data-center world of quantum computing, but in a world where scale beyond our current concept of it will be demanded because humans like Dr.
Rabinowitz there will be demanding the very best that we can come up with for decades, not just many months to come. You’ve seen us add a quantum foundry and be very deliberate about how we expand integrated photonics so we can provide more value to our nation’s quantum ecosystem, to our allies’ quantum ecosystem, so that they can go faster.
And you’ve heard clearly from Thomas and myself since we announced the SkyWater merger that our commitment to supporting existing SkyWater customers as well as new ones when it comes to everything from the best members of the team, as well as of course unparalleled IP protections, is absolute. We look forward to growing our merchant supply business with only more participants amongst the US, the Five Eyes, and the allied world.
We look forward to remaining the largest quantum company in history and the leader, not just in quantum computing, but also quantum networking, quantum sensing, quantum security, and of course our foundry business. I’m grateful for everyone’s support. There are many friendly faces in the audience, there are many new faces in the audience, and we’re excited by the breadth of demand that we’ve had for today, and the depth that you’ve been able to see in not just the R&D team, but also the go-to-market team, and the federal team is as much part of our go-to-market muscle as you’ve heard from the enterprise side of the house with our friend Chad.
The board of directors has been hugely supportive of our aggressive agenda, both technically and commercially, and you should expect to see only more of that in the coming twelve months. So I look forward to seeing you all at the podium downstairs. We’ll start up here with the remarks by our partners at the NYSE. I look forward to seeing all of you at World Quantum Day, when we will be back here on April 14th, 2027.
And of course I look forward to being able to proudly say a year from today, the next time we have Analyst Day, we have done what we said we would do, and IonQ’s say-do ratio is sky high and unparalleled despite the fact that we are pioneering before anyone else in the world so many different aspects of this unique quantum platform.
Well, thank you so much for a great day and thank you for your attention. We’ll talk to you soon.
Dr. Chris Ballance
Dr. Chris Ballance 18:36 – 31:08
Good afternoon, and welcome to the 2026 IonQ Investor Day. We’ve got some incredibly exciting announcements to share with you today. You’ve heard from Niccolò about the Superion platform. I’m going to tell you how we came up with this, the core technologies inside of it, how this is changing the way we innovate quantum computing, and how this platform is going to scale from hundreds to thousands to millions of qubits.
IonQ was founded to put quantum computers into the hands of users, and over the last ten years we’ve executed on that mission, over five generations of quantum computers, and this has taught us a tremendous amount. We’ve learned how to work alongside customers to tailor solutions that generate real-world value. We’ve learnt about operational excellence and the good pain it’s taken to build out these quantum computers, build out the supply chain, manufacturing and operational teams required to get quantum computers online on the cloud.
There’s now not an hour goes by without a job running on the IonQ quantum computer fleet, and we’ve deployed quantum computers around the world. This has taught us a tremendous amount. These are hard-won lessons, unique insights that can’t be learned any other way. And it’s also taught us the challenges we still need to overcome to get to large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers.
One, we need to radically simplify the platform if we want to build out systems with orders of magnitude more qubits and deploy orders of magnitude more of them, which we definitely do. We need to radically simplify the platform. At the same time, we need to learn faster. We need to go from learning over product cycles of years to product cycles of months.
And thirdly, we need to demonstrate scale. We need to build platforms which generation after generation build on each other to allow us to tackle problems that can’t be tackled any other way. These are daunting challenges, and these are the challenges that the Superion platform is designed for. First, radical simplification.
Only the simple scales. We need to make our platform as manufacturable and as deployable as possible to get out to the true scale we want, both the number of systems deployed and the number of qubits in those systems. Natural qubits, ions and atoms, have historically been controlled with lasers. This is a great technology for the zero-to-one phase, getting the first hardware built in the lab.
It’s challenging to mass manufacture. In the Superion platform, we replace these lasers for qubit control with electronics built into the chip — electronic qubit control. This allows us to take out this whole middle layer of laser control, directly connecting our classical control electronics to our quantum chip, and allows us to build out these quantum chips in standard semiconductor ways.
It also makes our systems more reliable. By stripping out this complexity, we can manufacture these things at scale, and eventually we can drive up the reliability and the deployability. But this electronic qubit control alone isn’t enough. In the same way as there’s a tremendous amount of technology that goes from a single LED to an LED pixel array, a TV display, there’s a tremendous amount of technology we’ve developed to go from single unit cells to unit cell arrays.
This technology we call quantum multiplexed I/O. We’ve built out an incredible, unique patent portfolio of IP around how we do this. What this is allowing us to do is to take these unit cells of electronic qubit control, these unit cells where we’ve achieved over four nines on the critical performance metric, two-qubit gate fidelity, and take these into scaled-out arrays of qubits.
This is one of the core technologies behind Superion and is what allows us to control dense arrays of qubits at scale. And I’m pleased to say, this is the picture of the first Superion 256 chip. We’re already producing these devices at scale at SkyWater by the wafer. And in parallel with doing that, we’re building these devices into packaged quantum processors just like this, that sit at the core of our Superion 256 quantum computers.
In parallel, we’ve been building out the physical footprint of these systems, the infrastructure that these quantum processors plug into. These are designed to be data-center deployable, to be mass manufacturable. Over the last year, we’ve gone from these basic technology demonstrations implementing this electronic qubit control with incredibly high fidelity, designing prototype chips that de-risk different aspects of fab, different aspects of the technology, building the first prototype systems, the first prototype chips.
Today, I’m pleased to announce that we now have ion qubits in these first prototype systems. Over the coming months, as we prepare to enter into production, we’re doing a tremendous amount of work to put these and make these things real. I’m proud to say that we expect to have the first systems starting deployments on customer sites in early 2027.
Over the last year, we’ve made some big strategic bets. We want to take the innovation cycles that are typical in the industry of years, and we’re striving to turn these into months. We think this needs to happen to hit the pace of innovation we want to achieve. We’ve made big operational changes to how we run the company, how we structure, how we develop our technology, how we run our teams to allow us to achieve this.
And this is paying off. Over the last six months, we’ve built more ion-trap chips, ion-trap quantum processors than we have in the history of the company to date. The numbers speak for themselves. We’re learning faster, we’re iterating faster, and we’re doing this over multiple generations in parallel. You’re going to hear more details about this from Tom Sonderman next.
To get out to true scale, to millions of qubits deployed around millions of data centers, we need to build out a core platform that allows us to hit this scale, that allows us to tackle applications that can’t be tackled any other way, and where each generation of the system teaches us about the next. The Superion 256 is the foundation of the Superion family, and contains the core technology that gets us all the way out to scale.
In parallel with this, over the last six months, we published our Walking Cat quantum error-correction architecture. This is the most detailed full-stack quantum computing architecture out there, and this carries on our theme of radical simplification. This paper shows from the hardware level to the quantum error-correction level to the compiler and application level across the full stack how we can significantly simplify everything involved in our quantum computers.
For example, going from using multiple different types of quantum error-correction code to one unified code, simplifying our architecture, simplifying our compute fabric, allowing us to scale faster. This Walking Cat architecture and the compute fabric we show in the 256 system takes us to our ten thousand qubit system.
The big addition to this is integrated cryogenic CMOS to implement our quantum multiplexing. We already have the de-risking of this CMOS built right now in SkyWater. You can see some of the first wafers over in the display case. To get to the next scaling node, we tile two dies together in two-and-a-half-D integration, and we carry on to hundreds of thousands of qubits by tiling out to more dies and by increasing the density of qubits on each die.
This scaling pathway takes us from hundreds of qubits, to thousands, to millions and millions of qubits. This is the Superion product family. It’s simple, it’s scalable, it’s mass manufacturable, and we’re building this in our sovereign fab today. At IonQ, we work across the full stack of quantum computing. This gives us value that’s well worth more than the sum of its parts.
We work from silicon all the way through to solutions, and we’re world-class innovators at every level of this stack. We’ve talked about the quantum processors, we’ve talked about the Walking Cat architecture. In parallel with all of this, in the last six months, we’ve demonstrated customized quantum error-correction codes running on real hardware with breakeven performance.
At the same time as this, we’re innovating across the classical software layers too. In the last couple of weeks, we put out the first mega-quantum-operation real-time decoding stack tailored for our ten thousand qubit device, showing we can run this using efficient classical computation in parallel with our quantum hardware.
And at the same time as doing all of this, we’re working across the quantum solutions stack. You’re going to hear more about this from Chad in half an hour or so. But we’ve demonstrated time-to-solution speedups on pure-play quantum algorithms. We’ve demonstrated speedups of hybrid quantum computing stacks, tailoring quantum processors, GPUs and CPUs working together to be better than each part individually.
Working across this full stack gives us a virtuous cycle of innovation. It allows us to learn from every different stage. It allows us to see around corners. We can tailor our quantum solutions to our hardware. At the same time, we can tailor our hardware and our software to see around the corner because we know what’s going to come in the next generation of quantum solutions.
This gives us a virtuous flywheel of innovation that we can only get through working across the entire quantum compute stack. There’s no better example of this than a result we’ve made public today. For the last thirty years, Shor’s algorithm has been the benchmark for scaled fault-tolerant quantum computing. People have spent careers optimizing, understanding, finding the nuances in how you approach these problems.
Today, we’ve made public the first full end-to-end compilation of Shor’s algorithm. This isn’t an estimate. We know exactly how many qubits we need for this. We know exactly the software we need to run this. We have the full model implemented down to every single physical operation we need to play on the device. In doing this, we’ve learned a tremendous amount.
We’ve made improvements across the stack, for example over a 30X improvement in our core error-correction modules like CCZ factories. A result like this shows the IonQ full-stack innovation flywheel playing out. Working at the level such as this where we’ve made significant innovations across the stack shows on the benchmark problem like Shor’s that’s been so well studied that we can make innovations across the entire stack of fault-tolerant quantum computing.
This shows the IonQ machine in action, the organizational machine we built. This shows the big strategic bets we’ve made over the last year paying off. This is the IonQ innovation flywheel in action. Thank you. I’m now going to pass over to Tom Sonderman to tell you all about what we do at SkyWater.
Dr. Chris Ballance 1:08:42 – 1:09:25
I will take that. Thanks, Chris. So in our core compute roadmap, we can scale out well beyond millions of qubits. This is, you know, looking on a five-year view. So right now, we don’t believe we need photonic interconnects in the near term for that. The customers that like photonic interconnects are typically not the customers who just want one big computer.
They’re doing things more than just that. They’re connecting quantum computers with quantum networks. They’re trying to work out how they position themselves so they can build a fleet of quantum computers and then work out how to expand this onto other problems. Right now, on the core compute roadmap, we don’t need photonic networking.
It’s a tremendously valuable thing to sell alongside our core quantum compute products.
Dr. Chris Ballance 1:10:04 – 1:11:46
well. So perhaps I will start to tell you what I’ve seen of SkyWater, and then Thomas can say how he actually makes this happen. So to me, a lot of this is the culture, how the business works. Semiconductors historically are low margin, incredibly high volume. I myself have spent a lot of time talking to foundries trying to explain that actually, if they make fewer parts but make a lot more money on them, you can multiply the numbers together and actually get a good value.
That’s a really difficult thing to get into the DNA of a fab. What I saw, and I’ll get technical briefly — back tail end of last year, an example of this: we had two different foundries we were working with. At the time, a major industrial foundry and SkyWater. The major industrial foundry was pushing out the delivery timelines for some hardware by a couple of months, six months out, since they had challenges with supply chain getting particular chemicals to put in particular machines that deposited particular layers.
SkyWater had the same challenge. We spoke to the SkyWater team on a Tuesday, and they said, "Our supplier is quoting us a month. That’s nonsense." In fact, they didn’t say nonsense, a slightly fruitier word, but their passion was clear. By two days after that, by the Thursday, they’d found out a supplier in Korea had one in stock and worked out how to horse-trade to swap this out.
And by Sunday, this was installed in a machine yielding results for us. Our other partner at the time was still giving us a two-month slip on a six-month timeline. So to me, this is just an indicator of the cultural differences at play, the amount of hustle, and the
appreciation that innovation cycles and learning speeds really are the critical thing when you’re trying to innovate at the frontier of technology like this.
Well
Dr. Chris Ballance 1:20:02 – 1:21:05
Okay, there were a lot of questions there, so I will try and answer them in order. I’ll take the last one. The net of this is that a tremendous amount of the work we’ve been doing over the last twelve months, and that SkyWater has been assisting us with, is building out lots of very fast-turn prototype deriskers to de-risk each one of these different elements faster.
This is what we call short loops. We want to learn each individual element, we want to decouple it. Accelerate our roadmap is by working across many different aspects of the technology in parallel, then integrating more and more of this. In fact, over to the side here, you can see a lot of the different short loops that de-risk different parts of the technology.
So the result of all of that is that we feel very confident in achieving the ultimate integrated performance on these systems. A lot of the work now we’re doing is on that integration and iteration. It’s about building out and validating a production scale for these devices, and that’s the work that’s going on right now as we lead up to production and the start of deployments of the first systems in early ’27.
I’ll hand it over to Tom for that.
Dr. Chris Ballance 1:23:45 – 1:24:59
So the question I heard was on tiling, what are the technologies needed to do that? How do we de-risk that? So first of all, I should say, and this is something I mean, it’s a point of pride, it’s not a quantum problem, it’s an integration problem. When we look at what we need to do to tile these devices together, it’s about die bonding with tight enough tolerances and then designing the transfer, which is an electrostatic phenomenon, right?
You’re pushing, physically pushing the qubits over the junction, designing the tolerances and like that. Where we’re at now, we’ve done thorough studies of industry-standard tolerances, and we’re comfortably within that. So we’re not pushing the limit of any one thing we need to do. The challenge here is a classic technology system-integration problem.
How do we push up yields? How do we make the packaging boring? How do we look at the value-add steps and order them such that we don’t add a lot of value to the hardware before we go. These are classic semiconductor industry problems, and these are the kind of things that SkyWater has put a lot of focus in understanding how to do.
So the stuff that worries me on that isn’t any one technology risk, it’s operational excellence. How do we properly understand the risks and how do we execute against it doing enough in parallel to make them boring? Right now, that isn’t a particularly exciting problem for us, and that, again, is high praise for me.
Tom Sonderman, SkyWater
Tom Sonderman, SkyWater 31:11 – 36:37
Thank you, Chris. Good afternoon, everyone. It’s an exciting time to be in the quantum industry, and certainly an exciting time to be at SkyWater. You know, our industry has a long history of working with brilliant physicists like Chris and turning their ideas into reality. And one thing that has happened recently with the partnership between SkyWater and IonQ is we’ve moved out of the physics demonstration realm to now manufacturing at scale in a highly developed operation that will allow us to not only deliver the speed required to get the cycles of learning necessary to drive the roadmap that Chris just showed, but also the scale.
Today we have thousands, literally thousands of quantum wafers running in our fab. A third of those are tied to IonQ. What that means is we’re designing for manufacturability. When it’s time to run at scale, we will be ready. Now, the challenge in our industry has always been: how do you get from the lab to the fab? And SkyWater was literally created to solve this problem.
We came up with this concept called a technology foundry and a business model called technology as a service that allows us to create the bridge over what’s known as the valley of death, where lots of great technologies start out in the lab, but they just never make it to the fab. And that’s because in a lab, you have ultimate degrees of freedom.
You can experiment, try many different aspects in terms of what you want to accomplish, and a fab is a little bit more restricted. So SkyWater was really created to solve that problem. Instead of mimicking other foundries — today there’s really only one conventional foundry, that’s TSMC — and the specialty foundries, which were foundries that basically couldn’t keep up with TSMC, so they chose to make other products, but again products that required a lot of standardization.
We took the opposite approach. We embraced customization. We embraced the idea that innovators needed an environment where they could have their ideas not only created in a volume environment, but also run at scale. So today, with the speed, accuracy, and agility that we bring together, coupled with front-end manufacturing and advanced packaging, we now have a capability that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world, and we’ve been doing it for over ten years.
Today, SkyWater is THE only quantum foundry. There are others that are talking about it, but recognize that what we put in place has been part of a strategy to not only create the environment, but create the security that protects those innovations. Because our focus around quantum isn’t just as a commercial business, but also it’s tied to national security.
Quantum is sovereign infrastructure, and it’s absolutely critical that SkyWater, IonQ and the quantum foundry model that we created protects the IP for our customers, and more importantly, protects our national security for things tied to the defense of our country. Speed in terms of the cycles of learning that we deliver, how fast we do them, but also the scale — those thousands of wafers allow you to do things in parallel, it allows you to do rapid learning, and what that will continue to do is move the projections that Chris has provided to the left.
That is our goal: to continue to move the roadmap to the left, and we believe that we are well on our way to doing that. So in the end, it’s all about speed, agility, and expertise. SkyWater has created something unique in our business model. And again, I’ll point out our first customer as part of our technology-as-a-service was the quantum company.
So we literally have decades, decades-plus of experience doing this type of fabrication. And when we couple that with our advanced packaging solutions, the ability to scale in a post-Moore’s-law realm is right in front of us. We have the capabilities in the front end in Minnesota, the capabilities in Florida, and as Chris alluded to, it’s all about scaling and tiling, which is heterogeneous integration.
So we are ready to execute. The other thing is that SkyWater is a quantum foundry. We have nine, as of the announcement today with Qolab, nine different quantum customers that are all working in SkyWater. So we aren’t just driving IonQ’s roadmap. We’re literally creating an industry, a quantum foundry industry, that will be foundational through the rest of this decade and beyond.
So when you think about SkyWater, you think about IonQ. Just remember that all roads for quantum lead through SkyWater. With that, I’ll turn it over to Jordan for the next portion of our presentation.
Tom Sonderman, SkyWater 1:08:01 – 1:08:01
All right.
Tom Sonderman, SkyWater 1:11:46 – 1:12:18
said, Chris. I’ll just add, and I think that’s a very astute question. You know, we do this on 90-nanometer technology. You hear others talk about, oh, you need 28 and below, and some people even talking about two nanometer. That’s ridiculous. The kinds of fabrication that we’re doing in a 200-millimeter fab, very mature environment, is very nicely adaptable to the kinds of innovations that Chris has.
So I think the cost per qubit you will see from SkyWater and IonQ continue to be industry leading.
Tom Sonderman, SkyWater 1:13:58 – 1:16:18
Yeah, so the whole quantum foundry model is really based on the foundry model, which is you manufacture parts for other companies, and protecting IP is foundational to that. So the way we treat any customer is we compartmentalize the information, we don’t cross-contaminate, and all of our customers and the audience here should be a hundred percent confident that their roadmap won’t be impeded by the needs of IonQ.
The ability for us to move fast with IonQ, who is our largest quantum company, allows those capabilities to be populated out across our other quantum customers. So it’s very much the rising tide lifts all boats. We are creating a quantum industry. We’re going to move very fast with IonQ, but all of our customers should have confidence we wanted to work with — we’re talking about.
Anduril is out there, you know, they bought HRL, but again, IBM sold their microelectronics business to GlobalFoundries back in 2015. So if they want to get back into it, so be it. GlobalFoundries, who I used to work at, they have capabilities, but they aren’t an innovation engine. They are a scaled specialty foundry. They love standardization.
We embrace customization. So it’s just a different model.
Tom Sonderman, SkyWater 1:17:18 – 1:18:30
Can we take that? So the capabilities we have between our Minnesota and Florida operations have more than enough capacity to deliver what we believe is required from Chris and his team on the compute side, as well as Jordan and his team on the broader quantum platform side. So again, these don’t require the same scale as like a smartphone or even AI data centers.
But they require lots of iterations. Eventually, products will go into volume manufacturing, and we will continue to innovate in parallel. When I was at AMD, competing against Intel, we were always running three nodes in parallel. You heard today, we’re running five devices in parallel. The ability to move with faster iterations just closes the gap between ideation and commercialization, and it’s all about time to market.
And I keep going back to, that’s why we created the technology-as-a-service model to innovate at scale and to create a model where companies could innovate. And it was great to see both Inder and Chris say we looked at all the other foundries, and we chose SkyWater because it validates the model.
Tom Sonderman, SkyWater 1:21:05 – 1:22:06
Yep. So think of Fab 25 as part of our foundry ecosystem, and that gives us significant purchasing power, supply-chain optimization. In many cases, we synergize between the different sites, and what I showed is our CMOS semiconductor foundry business, which we will continue to move forward. The complement of having a secure manufacturing facility and advanced packaging facility is important because that allows us to focus on the innovation side and also have a place where customers can migrate out of the Minnesota fab into, you know, say, a Texas fab.
But from a quantum perspective, think of that being Minnesota and Florida. It’s very conducive to the types of work that we’re doing, and semiconductor manufacturing is an expensive business, and having the economies of scale that you get by having a volume facility is a nice balance to that, and again, it’s all about lowering the cost per qubit.
Jordan Shapiro
Jordan Shapiro 36:47 – 46:47
Good afternoon. Thank you, Tom. On behalf of all of IonQ, I know we are so thrilled to have you and the SkyWater team joining our ranks. The advancements you heard today from Chris and from Tom on our quantum computing side have implications not just for quantum computing, but also for quantum security. And today we are seeing the convergence of two trends.
The first is that the analysis of how many qubits you need to reach Q-Day, or the day when a quantum computer will pose a threat to our critical infrastructure, is coming down precipitously. Today we announced 19,397 qubits is our requirement at IonQ, and it’s this advantage of quantum hardware and quantum software working together that are bringing that Q-Day threat closer than ever before.
At the same time, we’re seeing another trend, which is that governments are pulling in their migration requirements for companies and organizations and leaders worldwide to be much sooner than originally expected. Most recently, in June, the US executive order pulled in the migration timeline for the US from 2035 to 2030.
The result is that leaders today need to transition to quantum security now, and if they’re not transitioning now, they’re already too late. There’s already risk today with what we call harvest now, decrypt later, where adversaries are collecting encrypted data with the hope of decrypting that at a future date with quantum computers.
So today we already have exposure. But we also have the looming threat of Q-Day that is coming sooner and sooner, so today truly is the time to transition. The good news is that IonQ is providing that full-stack quantum security platform, or as Niccolò called it, we’re the safe breakers and the safe makers. How do we do this today?
Well, we offer customers quantum security posture management, or QSPM, which gives them visibility into their full infrastructure to determine where they are vulnerable to potential quantum attacks. Then we offer a CNSA 2.0 NIST-compliant solution that allows you to continue to update your infrastructure to be quantum secure, whether that be using PQC or post-quantum cryptography and injecting that throughout your infrastructure, or doing quantum key distribution, a physical solution that can span your entire network, but especially where it matters the most.
And that uses the same core underlying quantum physics, quantum mechanics, to protect your data sets from potential eavesdropping. We then help you orchestrate and manage those keys and evolve your solution architecture over time to what will be a changing standard of quantum security. We aren’t just building this technology, but deploying it today with customers.
I’m so proud to announce today that we have signed a major agreement with Congruity360 for the enterprise rollout of quantum security in the US. To our knowledge, this is the largest deal of its kind in the United States, bringing quantum security to leading enterprises. But it’s not just enterprises. It’s leading healthcare systems, financial institutions, government organizations, and telcos.
Take, for example, Singtel and SK Broadband, where we’ve rolled out our quantum security solutions. This makes IonQ not just the most robust platform, but also the most deployed platform when it comes to commercializing quantum security and providing a solution to the looming threat of Q-Day and HNDL. All of this is just one example of IonQ’s quantum platform at work, and it truly is a platform of different quantum technologies that converge to provide solutions that otherwise you wouldn’t have available.
In the case of quantum security, we understand the threats better than our competitors because we also have quantum computing as part of our business. Meanwhile, in the case of quantum computing, we offer the solution to the problem that we are also creating with having larger and more powerful quantum computers. And so this is a true example of IonQ’s quantum platform coming together, and you see this across the company in different areas as our technologies converge.
Take, for example, what we’re doing in quantum networking. We previously announced that we were the first company in an enterprise setting to interconnect two different quantum computers together, two IonQ trapped-ion systems with our partners at
Air Force Research Lab, or AFRL. We then have announced that we are providing AFRL with a quantum network for entanglement distribution that allows us to experiment with different modalities of quantum computers on the same network and different quantum devices that can be connected together.
Now we are working on the next step, which is to take our network which is fiber-based today and leverage IonQ’s optical communication technology to get off the fiber. In other words, to operate in free space. That’s interesting because it unlocks the capability of quantum connections that are airborne and in the future space- based.
This is just one way in which we’re leveraging IonQ’s quantum platform to expand our quantum computing technology. But we’re also seeing this happen the other way around. We’re using our quantum computers to advance technology throughout the company. Today, for the first time, I’m able to share that we are using our quantum computers with our remote sensing part of the organization as well.
IonQ captures on a daily basis data from across the globe, synthetic aperture radar data or SAR data. And when we look at those images, we can use classical conventions to try to understand what’s happening in the data, but we can also use quantum computers to do an even better job of that. Today you’re seeing what is the first example to our knowledge of a hybrid quantum-classical workflow with SAR data, where we’re taking IonQ’s quantum computer, we’re putting it in the loop, and we’re processing data from our SAR platform.
You’ll see in the orange circle here an image of Miramar Air Base, where there’s a structure changing between the first two images. The ground truth represents the actual change between the two images, the insight that you’re looking for as an analyst. The last three images represent different models that are trying to assess that data.
First is run on an IonQ quantum computer, and you can tell it’s the best because it identifies the structural change, it looks closest to the ground truth image, and it doesn’t have all the noise and the fuzziness of the classical models. This model is working better than classical, and it enables us to have a level of insight that no other SAR platform has today.
Meanwhile, we’re the only quantum computing company that has this great level of access to SAR data to run our quantum computers on. Every day, we’re looking at what technology is next for IonQ’s quantum platform and what continues to distinguish ourselves as a company. Take, for example, the quantum sensing technology that we brought to IonQ.
We produce, for example, the world’s most accurate commercial clocks at IonQ. These are quantum optical clocks. We also produce time-transfer devices, atomic gravimeters that can measure the specific gravity at any point on the Earth, gyroscopes that measure inertial movement, and so we have a precise level of sensing that uses the same underlying quantum physics to build new devices and new capabilities, especially in the field of positioning, navigation, and timing, or PNT.
That is relevant in many enterprise and defense use cases. This technology isn’t just available at IonQ, it’s world leading. Our quantum clocks are a thousand times more accurate than the classical equivalent, best-in-class classical equivalent, and they lead the entire field in NIST’s ensemble of clocks, meaning that they’re the best performing clocks that NIST has available today in this form factor.
We are seeing the deployment of this technology as well. It’s not just in a lab somewhere. We’re able to deploy our quantum sensors at sea, in space, on the X-37B space plane, on land, in the air, et cetera. And so we’re truly deploying our technology everywhere. Don’t just take it from IonQ. You’re seeing this from our partners across the entire quantum platform.
Our US government customers are validating our technologies, whether they be our quantum computing platform with DARPA QBI, our quantum sensors, most recently the fifty-eight million dollar agreement for the It’s About Time program, but also our networks and our space technology, recent contract with NRO as well on the space side.
What this validates is that IonQ is not only leading in each individual technology — which we are — but also that these technologies are converging, are coming together to offer unique solutions that only IonQ can deliver. That is the power of a platform that is stronger together. Thank you.
Jordan Shapiro 1:25:01 – 1:26:58
So Craig, I would say the story of IonQ is that we are greater than the sum of our parts, and that’s really what you’re seeing happen on stage today, in part through the conversations between Chris and Tom, between SkyWater and IonQ, but also across the platform. And you’re right, customers are approaching us and asking not just for one part of the platform, but for integrated solutions, and that is virtually global, in every country around the globe, and virtually in every area, every industry.
We’re seeing customers come to us asking about integrated technologies and solutions. Take for example, just on the global side, we offer an incredibly compelling set of solutions to any sovereign nation that might want everything from advanced PNT to operate in GPS-denied environments, increasingly important in today’s geopolitical landscape, to the computing power that will change their economy for the better in the future.
And so sovereigns are interested, of course, in all forms of technology across quantum, but also in every industry you have enterprises that are coming to us asking for joint solutions. So financial companies, for example, any financial services firm —
we’re in the heart, a financial heart here in New York — we are having conversations about financial applications of quantum computing, and then we’re hopping over to the security team to talk to the CISO about quantum security.
Or in oil and gas, we’re talking about quantum chemistry solutions and also using PNT for finding new oil wells, and at the same time working on quantum security as well for critical infrastructure that oil and gas has. So very frequently, we’re seeing that IonQ is differentiated from any other company in that we offer the most robust set of quantum technologies in the world, and people come to us looking for joint solutions across that space.
So
Jordan Shapiro 1:27:00 – 1:27:01
Thanks,
Jordan Shapiro 1:28:48 – 1:28:54
And we have an example of one such photonic integrated circuit for our sensing unit that’s in the showcase over here as well.
John McPeak, Rosenblatt Securities
John McPeak, Rosenblatt Securities 1:08:17 – 1:08:38
Thank you. Oh yeah, cheers. Let you guys sit down or should I just shoot? Charge! John McPeak at Rosenblatt Securities. Thanks for doing this, guys. At what number of physical qubits does photonic quantum interconnect become important, in your roadmap?
Nihal Choksi, Northland
Nihal Choksi, Northland 1:09:29 – 1:10:04
All right, thank you, here. Hello, Nihal Choksi from Northland Capital Markets. Nihal Choksi from Northland Capital Markets. Probably for Thomas, maybe for Chris, but the reduction in cycle time from eight months to two months is absolutely astounding. I would love to get more insight on how you guys have achieved that, and I’m thinking one element may be which lithography node IonQ is working SkyWater with, and you know what range of lithography nodes does SkyWater work with as
Gary Mobley, StoneX
Gary Mobley, StoneX 1:13:05 – 1:13:58
Great to be here. Sure, my mic’s on yet. Can you hear me okay? We can hear you. All right, Gary Mobley with StoneX. Thanks for hosting this event, just very helpful. I got a couple questions for Tom, if I can. So, you know, I think you mentioned in your presentation you have nine quantum compute companies. I presume one of them is IonQ.
So from those other eight, what have the conversations been like with respect to their comfort in dealing with you as a foundry partner to making sure that you won’t essentially handicap their roadmap. And how much of a time lead do you think you have vis-à-vis IBM and others or GlobalFoundries QTS before they hit their milestones and become a real alternative to SkyWater?
Thank you.
Analyst (unidentified)
Analyst (unidentified) 1:16:18 – 1:17:16
Okay, thank you. I have two simple questions. I have no doubts of scale-up and the applications, but I’m just wondering if you guys have a scale-out roadmap for the photonic interconnect, phase three and four. From my understanding, photonic interconnect phase four is really, really complicated to make it. And also, the other thing, so as we have the applications in shorter cycles, I believe we need to have capabilities of both little manufacturing capabilities.
So do you have any plan or kind of the capabilities perspective.
Quinn Bolton, Needham
Quinn Bolton, Needham 1:19:09 – 1:20:01
Quinn Bolton with Needham, one for Chris and then one for Tom. Chris, you mentioned you’re starting to load the 256 QPU with ions. I guess can you talk about when will you have enough data to talk about gate fidelity, median gate fidelity across the two hundred and fifty-six qubits in that QPU? How confident are you in hitting the fidelity?
You talked about crosstalk being a technology that you’ve developed, some technology to reduce crosstalk, so maybe expand on that. And then for Tom, just can you discuss plans for Fab 25? Does that stay sort of a quasi-independent CMOS high-volume fab for non-quantum customers, or do you see a time where you might start to run some of the quantum wafers at Fab 25.
Thank you.
Craig Ellis, B. Riley
Craig Ellis, B. Riley 1:22:45 – 1:23:44
All right, Craig Ellis, B. Riley Securities. Thanks so much to all of you for all of the insights today. I want to start with a question for Chris and then jump to one for Jordan. So Chris, as we look out to the end of the decade at your roadmap, and we see the scale-up to billions of qubits, tiling gets really important.
Can you help us understand the technology competencies you’ll need to have to execute in that part of the roadmap. Where are we today and what we need to accomplish? And then, Jordan, you wrapped up by stating that in the technology areas you focused on, there’s more and more interest across those three areas. Tell us more about how customers are engaging.
Are you seeing it across geos? Is it more as a result of executive orders that hit in the US? Just more insight on that would be helpful. Thanks, guys.
Vijay Rakesh, Mizuho
Vijay Rakesh, Mizuho 1:26:58 – 1:26:59
we probably have time for about one more question.
Vijay Rakesh, Mizuho 1:27:01 – 1:27:29
guys. Vijay at Mizuho, just a quick question. You had made an acquisition of Nexus Photonics, just wondering how that fits into the IonQ and SkyWater roadmap. And also, for Inder, I guess, how do you look at the 256-qubit systems? What is pricing on that? And if you can give us some idea on how to look at fiscal 27, I guess, between the core IonQ and the SkyWater, right?
Mihir Bhaskar
Mihir Bhaskar 1:27:36 – 1:28:47
That was his baby. All right. Can you — okay, mic is active. So the Nexus Photonics acquisition is really another one of these one-plus-one-equals-thirty stories with SkyWater, right? SkyWater has the ability to manufacture, and Nexus brings a proven pedigree, intellectual property capability for design and integration of integrated photonic solutions.
So combining them together means we can take, in particular, photonics solutions, which are required for most — many modalities of quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, whether it’s ions, atoms, photonics, networks, sensors, and take the complexity of hand-assembled systems and integrate those components on a chip.
And I’ll have a little bit more to say about that in my presentation as well. So Nexus really allows us — where it has the first impact for us is really in our quantum sensing devices. Already we’re manufacturing more and more of these clocks and inertial navigation sensors. Right now, a lot of these components are discrete.
We’re packaging them basically at the level that you can package these discrete elements, but there’s still wires and things coming out. They’re still hand assembled. Taking the most complex parts and putting them on a chip is what Nexus allows us to do.
Mihir Bhaskar 1:31:00 – 1:37:17
rest of the management team. So while we wait for this to change over, I swear I didn’t plant some of those questions in the audience. I am going to talk about what I’m obsessed with: scaling quantum systems, right? And we heard about scaling out, right, in the data center, and we also heard about integrated technologies.
How do you scale up the chips and move the complexity in today’s quantum computers, networks, and sensors into integrated circuits that can be manufactured? Those are the two things that I’m going to talk about. Last year, Dr. Monroe and I took the stage and talked about our photonic interconnects. This has been part of IonQ’s story about how we envision building large-scale, really data-center-scale systems, and the reason it’s part of the story is because it’s how we build large-scale hyperscale technology today.
It’s not just a mainframe, it’s a network of modular interconnected systems. And really the elephant in the room when it comes to quantum interconnects is that quantum interconnects are very slow. So to give you a sense, historically we have benchmarked quantum interconnect in units of hertz, whereas the requirements for actually connecting quantum computers together to enable this vision is kilohertz.
And so today, I’m very, very excited and very proud of the team to announce that we have met the milestone of building a photonic-based quantum interconnect that is above a kilohertz. And so this isn’t just an incremental advance, this is really a step change, right? This means we can now connect quantum systems together fast enough to sustain distributed computation, so we can actually think about addressing the scale-out problem and building not just technologies in the R&D lab, but technologies that will actually enable quantum data centers.
The second reason this is exciting is we didn’t just reach this result by turning some knobs and making incremental advances. We actually took a fundamentally new approach, which we talked about last year, through the acquisition and integration of Lightsynq technology, which is a quantum memory. We took our quantum computing system, our trapped ions, and we connected it to this quantum memory in order to really use a new architecture, a heterogeneous architecture, a device optimized for computing and a device optimized for networking working together to create a system that’s better than the sum of its individual parts.
And this is really special for me. It may take a moment to sink in for everyone else. I mean, many of you are sitting on your laptops. We take this for granted every single day. We have technologies that are designed for certain things — CPUs, GPUs, and networking cards — all talking together, all working together. But when we think about designing quantum systems to date, we have not yet, until this moment, successfully combined two different types of systems and gotten improved performance.
So this really marks maturity in being able to create heterogeneous technologies. It’s why we’re proud to be a DARPA HARK performer. It’s exactly the subject of the HARK program, and we think this milestone applies not just to trapped-ion systems. We’re excited to truly build heterogeneous systems and think this will be the leading interconnect solution for all modalities, so trapped ions, trapped atoms, superconductors, and more.
So that’s about scaling out. But there’s also a lot that you’ve seen today about scaling up on chip, and I’m very, very excited to be stepping into a role, working directly with Tom Sonderman at SkyWater, where we announced today that we are launching the industry’s first dedicated quantum foundry platforms. And so while others have talked about a quantum foundry, Tom told you about how SkyWater has been actually delivering wafers for over a decade.
You can see some of those wafers, both here on the screen and also in the gallery. But what we’re launching here goes far beyond that. These are scalable and reproducible platforms that create an open ecosystem for quantum computing companies, whether they’re building atom, ion, superconducting, photonic, or spin-based processors.
They need semiconductor solutions that are tailored to and designed for quantum signals. And so I want to unpack the two sides of this platform. There are really two distinct technology elements. And you only need two. There are only two physics ways to route quantum signals. It’s light and it’s superconducting electronics, just like there’s copper and fiber in the data center.
There’s really a quantum analog, and we have the world’s only quantum platforms for semiconductor manufacturing. So the first one on integrated photonics — there was a question about how Nexus Photonics really fits in here — so I’m really honored and thrilled to be joined by a luminary in the field of integrated photonics, Professor John Bowers.
He pioneered the development of putting laser systems on a chip, and without that, we really wouldn’t have the massive scale-out of today’s AI data centers, the optical interconnects that are connecting GPUs and computing devices. And the way to understand how this applies to quantum is that Nexus has pioneered that same technology for putting quantum lasers on chip.
And so on the left side of the screen here is one of our quantum sensing devices. As you can see, it’s discrete components. They’re integrated about as tightly as you can, but you can still see a jumble of wires connecting everything together. So the Nexus technology, the designs, the intellectual property, the integration know-how is what allows you to take that complexity and put it on a single chip at a fraction of the size, weight, power, cost, and with much higher manufacturability and yield and reliability.
And so Nexus brings the know-how, the expertise, and SkyWater brings the prowess of being able to manufacture this all on US soil. So this is the photonic side of the story. SkyWater also serves a number of customers that build superconducting technology, and we’re very, very excited today to also announce a partnership with a leading superconducting qubit company, Qolab, which is co-founded by, and a CTO of this company is Nobel laureate Dr.
John Martinis. So instead of hearing it from me about how this works, we’d like you to hear a little segment from Dr. Martinis.
Mihir Bhaskar 1:39:29 – 1:39:55
As a physicist, it’s personally very exciting to get to work with Dr. Martinis, but I think strategically, you should ask yourself when you think about the quantum foundry, where are the leaders and luminaries in the field choosing to build their quantum technologies? So whether it’s Dr. Bowers in the audience who I encourage you to meet later, or whether it’s Dr.
Martinis, it’s happening at SkyWater. And really, to unpack this further, I’m thrilled to invite CEO of Qolab, Alan Ho, to the stage.
Mihir Bhaskar 1:42:03 – 1:42:35
Thank you, Alan. And just to conclude and move on to the next section, I hope you can see how, whether it’s through the scale- out solutions or the scale-up semiconductor ecosystem, all of the roads to scaling quantum are running through the team in this room.
And so very proud and excited to next hear from Chad about what applications this is going to and currently enabling. Thank you so much, Mihir.
Alan Ho, Qolab
Alan Ho, Qolab 1:40:01 – 1:42:03
So I want to contextualize what we’re trying to build. If you look at the processors in the ’60s, it looks kind of like this. You have all these jumble of wires, all these discrete components, et cetera. And the big innovation that was invented by Nobel laureate Jack Kilby, and the CEO of I’m very proud to work with SkyWater.
I’m very proud to work with SkyWater to create, to be their first customer for the SC250 process. SkyWater not only provides us a predictable unit economics for manufacturing, which is required for us to underwrite, investors to underwrite manufacturing at scale, but moreover, it’s also located in the heartland. People talk about Silicon Valley.
People don’t really talk about the Silicon Heartland too much. And to give you a little bit of understanding about that, Qolab does all its design, packaging, and cryogenic testing in Madison, Wisconsin, also in the Midwest. Now, the reason why I’m so proud of this is because having a quantum manufacturing ecosystem in the Midwest is a resilient quantum manufacturing ecosystem for America.
Thank you.
Chad Sakac
Chad Sakac 1:42:36 – 1:59:52
Thank you very much. How’s everyone doing? \[Chad go-to-market remarks continue through applications, AstraZeneca, protein folding, IEEE Quantum Week, cytochrome P450, customer engagement — full text restored below.\] All right, we’re getting close to the next phase and the end of this, so I’m going to change up the energy here in the room a little bit.
This is going to be something a little bit different. If you couldn’t tell from the suit change, I represent the go-to-market part of IonQ. So you’ve heard from the scientist. I’m an engineer who also spends a lot of time with customers. So what I want to share with you is a little bit of what we’re seeing, what we’re doing, and I’m going to start with a little bit of a story to change the way we’re thinking about this.
In the Renaissance era, Leonardo da Vinci had a dream. Humans can fly like a bird. Was crazy, nothing came of it. It was invention. Fast forward December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers create the first human-powered flight, a glorious 12 seconds, with a plane where there was only one manufactured in the world. They built it themselves, with whatever the 1903 version was of duct tape and bubble gum.
This is kind of like the early days of quantum computing, and some are still figuring out how to get out of this phase and into the next phase. What did humans do? We iterated. We turned into, how do we productionize this? How do we make it manufacturable? How do we make it safe, reliable, deployable? And companies like Boeing emerge, and the Boeing 737, still widely used today, basically brought flight to the masses.
And where do we as humans find ourselves today? Stuck in Atlanta airport? In a very dense situation like this, but of course, this is scale. At this point, airlines aren’t about airplanes anymore. They’re about changing how the world works, how societies function. And I call this building the machine that makes the machine, and I’m not talking about the quantum computer machine.
I’m talking about the organization, the people, the process — how do you take these things to scale? I think that we are now in the iterate phase and in the scaling phase of IonQ’s life. You saw and heard multiple examples throughout this, and I love to hear Alan’s comment about how we’re doing it not just for ourselves with trapped-ion systems, but also with superconducting modalities.
How awesome is that? In April I was on this stage talking about time to solution. Customers very rarely ask about two-qubit gate fidelity or coherence time. They ask how long will it take to get to a solution that’s valuable for my workload, and what are the economics. Time to solution, economics to solution. Our advantage is that we are like a sniper versus a shotgun.
Sometimes we’re about the same, sometimes 10x, 100x, 1,000x, 10,000x better. More interesting: we published the repo so anyone could duplicate the results. We published third-party validation. We showed up with receipts. One of those workloads where we’re about 1,000 to 10,000 times faster is a quantum Fourier transform, which shows up in Shor’s algorithm.
Quantum phase estimation shows up in chemistry and life-sciences use cases. We focus here on life sciences and pharma, with examples in every vertical. Work with AstraZeneca continues; three iterations so far. Protein-folding work. Oxytocin has nine amino acids. GLP-1s are roughly 30 to 50 amino acids. We used Forte Enterprise and Tempo hardware on 12 then 14 amino acids.
Einride logistics work brought with CCRM to healthcare. Quantum pattern-finding on fMRI for early-onset brain cancer and dementia. AI plus ML with quantum. IEEE Quantum Week: 857 papers submitted, 20 selected for best papers. We submitted 13,
10 entered, four of our ten won best in show — a 3.7-sigma event. Example: quantum algorithms improving LLM behavior, 24 percent better accuracy, lower time to solution, better energy efficiency.
Synopsys work updated in August. Protein folding on Tempo from 14 to 16 amino acids. Paper with NVIDIA and Oak Ridge on using LLMs to improve quantum algorithms. GPU and QPU clusters working hand in hand. Cytochrome P450 is not solvable today on classical methods exactly right. About $2 to $3 billion a year of research.
2025 Google/Caltech paper is at a scale more than a Superion 20K could do; we could do it with a 100K, or with five 20K systems in parallel, pulling a workload forward two years — hundreds of millions of NPV. Networking is not a prerequisite, but pulling work forward has immense economic value. We more than doubled the customer-engagement team in the first half.
About 70 people worldwide on forward-deployed engineering, customer solutions, and apps R&D, almost entirely PhDs. Activity beats almost everything. Hired an oil-and-gas specialist who in month one met two of the largest U.S. energy companies; they already had a quantum science team. Customers like choice of language — we support all seven major open-source IDEs/stacks — and choice of where: cloud, on-prem, sovereign.
EPB started in networking, expanded to computing; system being commissioned; expanding into quantum memories in Chattanooga. Customers who bought Aria and Forte bought Tempo and want Superion cloud access. We’re in the iterate and scale phase in hardware and go-to-market. Great segue to the customer panel. Thank you.
John Lokada, ServiceNow
John Lokada, ServiceNow 2:01:46 – 2:02:32
Yeah, good afternoon, everybody. I think it’s really important to note that the way we’re looking at this is looking at two lanes. So we look at security. Clearly the opportunity around QKD is quite fascinating. ServiceNow has been leading with security. We’ve acquired Armis and Veza. We are innately becoming more focused on the role of security into the future of workflows, which dovetails into the second opportunity that I believe is worth calling out, which is optimization.
And I think there no longer can be two different lanes of security and optimization. I think secure optimization is the really interesting path. So for us, we’re looking at quantum plus AI, and it’s been wonderful to be on the journey of exploration with the team at IonQ.
John Lokada, ServiceNow 2:10:25 – 2:12:52
And I think for us, the word trust is very subjective, and we’re trying to see what we can do to redefine the very definition of hybrid work. For most people, hybrid work is working from home and working in the office. But what if you can imagine working across classical and quantum systems? Quantum won’t help every problem, and I think sometimes people look at quantum as a very fast, speedy solution when in fact several days is fine for the right strategic solution that you could deliver.
Understanding — the great American rock and roll band Aerosmith had a quote that you need to know how to lose before you can win, and I think to Matt’s point, you need to know where AI stops. You need to know where the complexities become far greater, and we need to start thinking outside the box to see what we can do to deliver the future of workflows, hybrid workflows, quantum plus AI.
We are hearing from some folks a little bit too much of keeping those two words mutually exclusive. But we see the convergence, and to deliver that we need to redefine how the workflows are actually delivered. It’s process management, it’s workflows of the future, but as we start to become more future ready, we need to look beyond the letters PQC, and PQC is largely classical anyway.
We need to understand how we can lead with security and how we can drive opportunities that absolutely make sense for modern-day GPUs, but when you need the QPUs there, you need the plumbing that can integrate between today and tomorrow. And picking up on a point that Chad made about today and tomorrow, too much of the focus is on using quantum to solve today’s challenges, where we, from the Futures team, actually look at where the problems could evolve.
There will be several billion agents coming online over the next several years. How can you orchestrate that? How can you actually leverage the probabilistic intelligence to deliver true deterministic workflows? So for us, we’re looking at bringing this together to really become ready, because no company could become future-proof, but we do believe quantum plus AI — you could do a lot more to become future ready.
John Lokada, ServiceNow 2:19:00 – 2:19:24
I would just say that operational resiliency is a term not used a lot in this discussion, and I think that we need — this is a partner ecosystem. Coming together is mutually beneficial. So I look forward to building upon the conversations with the group and the industry in general, but I think that we need to look more long term and understand that the longevity is also operational resiliency, not just compliance.
Robert Long, EPB
Robert Long, EPB 2:02:32 – 2:03:42
Hey everyone. Robert Long with EPB. We are, as Niccolò said, we have a quantum network. We’ve had our network in place for about ten years now. We have a full fiber network in the Chattanooga area, and we are picking around the quarter when our IonQ Forte Enterprise system will be fully commissioned. So we have the first nationally available quantum network, as well as the first commercially available quantum computer.
So we’re making our systems available, and we are approaching different business aspects with those in the community and nationally, and really focusing on the energy grid, energy-grid optimization and energy security, and really utilizing pretty much the full stack of IonQ services. As Chad mentioned, we have eight fellows via this grant, and we leverage the IonQ training platform to train our fellows, and we are writing our own algorithms and running our own programs to service the energy needs of the industry.
Robert Long, EPB 2:08:09 – 2:10:24
I’ll go. Thanks, Niccolò. With our quantum network and thinking of what we’re trying to build in Chattanooga, adding the quantum computer, we really want to have an ecosystem that builds within Chattanooga, centered around quantum, our network and our computer. We are the local power utility and generally maybe not thought about with quantum, but to be able to leverage our full fiber network — ten years ago we partnered with Oak Ridge National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, as well as Qubitekk, now in the IonQ family, and worked on and successfully tested QKD across a 21-kilometer span on our fiber network.
We took that as continued drive to fully build out our fiber network with quantum, as well as add the quantum computer. And now with IonQ forming an office, landing an office in Chattanooga, an R&D facility, Vanderbilt is coming to Chattanooga over the next three to five years. They’ve announced a satellite office with 250 faculty or staff.
We have partnerships with UT Chattanooga and other entities looking to come and continue to build out the ecosystem around quantum. First mover, continuing that momentum. Momentum gets momentum. We’re continuing to invest, pull investors into Chattanooga, make our computer available physically in our quantum center or via the cloud.
We have a very supportive city and county as well as a state government that wants to invest behind quantum to make Chattanooga and Tennessee a leader.
Robert Long, EPB 2:19:26 – 2:19:58
I’ll just add that I believe that the future will need an unbelievable amount of teamwork and connectivity to work together to solve these problems and to have these connections and cooperation across various organizations. The government having the support and coordinating those efforts will absolutely pull forward the technology and continue to push the US to a leadership position in quantum.
Dr. Matthew Rabinowitz, Natera / MyOme
Dr. Matthew Rabinowitz, Natera / MyOme 2:03:45 – 2:07:00
Hello everyone, Matthew Rabinowitz. I’ll just kind of give an anecdote for why I’m so excited about what IonQ is presenting today. There are problems in AI where we still don’t really understand whether we are limited by the data that’s available or we’re limited by the architectures and finding the global minimum of those architectures.
Take a cartoon example of a protein-folding problem. Imagine you’ve got a hundred amino acids, and amino acids one and two can rotate relative to one another, and whatever they decide will be relevant to all of the energy configurations of the other amino acids, including one hundred. If you assume, as IonQ did in one of their papers, that you’ve got four different permutations between each amino acid, you’ve got four to the power of a hundred hypotheses that you’ve got to evaluate.
It’s computationally non-tractable. Now we’ve been able to solve this kind of problem classically with systems like AlphaFold, but it doesn’t really solve those problems robustly. What’s incredible is that in nature you always find that global minimum when you make a protein in a cell from a DNA sequence somehow, by a combination of quantum tunneling and jiggling.
That protein always finds that global minimal folded structure and doesn’t get stuck in a local minimum the way the AI algorithms of today do. That’s an incredibly powerful concept if you can apply it to the challenges we have in AI architectures today. Huge applications in healthcare: protein binding, neoantigen prediction for personal cancer vaccines, predicting how patients will respond to certain therapies, prognostic applications.
And then MyOme, a private company, is trying to solve healthcare in the United States based on whole-genome analysis and AI modeling of electronic medical records. We’ve built models with leaders in the field that suggest we can save over two hundred billion dollars to the United States healthcare system by predicting susceptibility to common and rare diseases where we can catch these diseases much earlier when they’re much cheaper to treat and delay or stop the onset.
The application of AI to tease out the signals in these genetic datasets — DNA and very noisy gene-expression data, very noisy clinical data — is a problem AI has a huge role in, and we believe quantum AI will play a role in the future as well.
Dr. Matthew Rabinowitz, Natera / MyOme 2:12:54 – 2:18:53
Well, I just grabbed you by the lapels because you’re always so fancily dressed. I just wanted to ruffle you up a bit, so that was the motivation. And I’m not so much a capitalist these days. I like to work on really hard, interesting problems that are going to be very important for mankind, and I think that the kind of things that IonQ is enabling are down that vector.
In 2010 I had a patent on training multi-layer nonlinear dynamic systems with embedded memory. Stanford let the patent expire because they didn’t want to pay the thousand-dollar annual fee and they couldn’t get hold of me. This was the year before Google Brain started to work intensively on training multi-layer nonlinear neural perceptrons with memory.
I never dreamed at the time that you could do these incredible things with deep learning neural-network architectures if you trained them, these transformer and convolutional network architectures, on the entire internet of information just to predict the next word in a sentence. I am trying to be ahead of these possibilities.
Natera has an incredible amount of oncology data. We can catch the recurrence of cancers years or months before you see clinical symptoms. We can see how you’re responding to therapy better than imaging. We can see in the adjuvant setting after surgery whether all the cancer’s been cleared and who will and won’t benefit from chemotherapy.
This is about seeing single molecules from the tumor in the blood. With that capability we have a huge amount of data — curated clinical data with AI models, upfront tumor sequence and RNA sequence most of the time, outcomes — and we can train models, for example on neoantigen prediction for personal cancer vaccines. Less than one percent of the mutations in a tumor will be good neoantigens.
Those are the kind of problems where there’s hope that with these quantum algorithms you can be selecting your neoantigens more effectively. In the MyOme work, looking at predicting disease more generally, there’s a collaboration with IonQ. We are looking at the fine-tuning of LLMs. Training a whole LLM on a quantum architecture is still on the come, but if you do the fine-tuning with a quantum architecture, you take the embedding from the deep-learning architecture.
There was a beautiful paper that came out of IonQ in May looking at fine-tuning a large language model to look at text and see whether reviews were positive or negative. We emulated a very similar architecture. We had about an 800-length vector embedding out of a standardized large language model, then we tested with six qubits on the quantum output layer as the fine-tuning head, then with fourteen qubits.
We saw the power of this model going from 0.7 AUC to 0.83. This was a simulation of the quantum hardware. As we’re able to add more qubits on the fine-tuning quantum head of these existing large models, I think there’s a lot of opportunity there to build these various disease-predictive models.
Alessio Butti, Italy
Alessio Butti, Italy 2:21:37 – 2:27:25
Thank you. I took some notes. Good afternoon, Niccolò, members of the IonQ leadership team, distinguished guests and colleagues. Please bear with me because I have a terrible jet lag. It’s a privilege to join you today at the New York Stock Exchange on behalf of the Italian government. Thank you for the invitation. Investor Day is naturally about performance, strategy, and growth.
My responsibility is to look at the broader question: how can government, industry, and science work together so that transformative technology creates lasting economic and social value? Quantum is at a turning point where scientific breakthroughs are beginning to translate into real-world applications with growing economic, social, and strategic significance.
Our ambition is very clear. Italy intends to become one of Europe’s leading centers of quantum technologies. That is why I personally focused on this area and why under my direction Italy adopted its first national strategy for quantum technology. We issued it last year in July, at the same time Europe did. The strategy goes beyond computing.
It encompasses quantum communication and security, sensing, research, skills, and the development of a strong industrial ecosystem. Italy’s National Quantum Forum brought government, researchers, universities, and industry together to begin turning strategy into action. We don’t want Italy simply to use quantum technology developed elsewhere.
We want to help create them. This is where international cooperation is vital. The United States brings technological leadership and entrepreneurial strength. Italy brings scientific excellence, engineering talent, universities, and industrial capabilities. Together, we can create opportunities that neither country could achieve alone.
Niccolò, you spoke about the quantum renaissance. I was pleased when I first heard you mention this when we met in Rome last year, because it is a concept that I have also been discussing for some time. I believe in Italy’s quantum renaissance. Italy has an extraordinary scientific tradition. The Renaissance wasn’t about looking backward.
It was about moving forward. And quantum can help us do exactly that. It can become a catalyst for innovation across manufacturing, aerospace and defense, life sciences, energy, cybersecurity, telecommunication, finance, and advanced materials. We welcome companies such as IonQ Italia, led by Marco Pistoia, bringing global quantum expertise to Italy and investing in talent, research and universities.
IonQ’s decision to establish IonQ Italia reflects this collaborative approach. Niccolò de Masi, Marco Pistoia — it seems like an Italian company. The Q alliance, of which IonQ is a founding member, is another important part of this vision. It connects companies, universities, and research institutions and provides researchers with access to advanced quantum compute systems.
But technology alone isn’t enough. We must invest in people, skills, and trust, and connect research to real economic and social needs. Quantum technology will be measured by the problems it solves, the productivity it creates, the knowledge it expands, and the opportunities it gives our citizens. That is why Italy wants an open, competitive, and technology-neutral ecosystem in line with the European Union.
No country, company, or university can build the quantum future alone. Thank you to IonQ for this invitation and for its continuing engagement with Italy. Niccolò and Marco, I look forward to seeing you next month in Cernobbio, on Lake Como, at the Como Lake Digital Innovation Forum, where we signed an important MOU last year to develop quantum in Italy and Europe.
To the entire IonQ team, I wish you every success for Investor Day and look forward to the next chapter of our cooperation. Thank you so much.
Gen. John W. Raymond, IonQ Board
Gen. John W. Raymond, IonQ Board 2:30:47 – 2:31:17
Well, thank you, Niccolò. And what a wonderful day this is. It’s a real privilege to be part of the IonQ team and to be here this afternoon. As Niccolò said, I served about thirty-five and a half years in the Air Force and then transitioned over to the Space Force in 2019. As I reflect on the environment in 2019 as it relates to space, it was becoming — our nation was becoming much more reliant on space.
There was a sense of national urgency associated with moving at speed.
Gen. John W. Raymond, IonQ Board 2:37:39 – 2:38:32
Yeah, I’ll be happy to. As I look at the IonQ team, you asked me what attracted me to come to IonQ. It was the team. And it was a team that operated, in my opinion, with the same integrity that I saw when I was in the Space Force or in military service. It was a team that was as mission focused as, as Robert said, we were when we were in the military.
And to me, it felt like it was a good fit. It’s also a team that’s grown significantly over the last few years. And if you look at what we did in establishing Space Force, we took the vast majority — were like me, they came out of the Air Force — but we also brought together people from the Army and the Navy and the Marines, and we brought people from off the street and out of colleges and out of the academies, and we had to integrate these people all together into one high-functioning team that our nation required.
And I see that —
Gen. John W. Raymond, IonQ Board 2:44:40 – 2:45:04
Yeah, I am not the smart guy. That’s why they set me down on this end and put the smart guy way down on that. I went to Clemson University, otherwise known as the Harvard of the South, I guess. But what I do know is that to take the brains of the folks that you’ve heard and to be able to translate those into real capabilities and put them in the hands of the warfighter is nationally critical.
That’s what IonQ does really, really well. And I will tell you when you’re talking about national security —
Robert Cardillo, IonQ Board / former NGA
Robert Cardillo, IonQ Board / former NGA 2:33:00 – 2:35:00
So, thank you. I had the privilege to serve almost four decades in the US government, all of that in our intelligence community, most of it in the geospatial-intelligence world that I was privileged to lead at the end of my career. But that service crossed seven presidents. I had the privilege in that time period to spend four years I was in the Oval Office, providing that intelligence service to important customers at critical moments.
And if I learned anything from all of that, I learned that strategic surprise doesn’t come from not expecting what’s coming over the next horizon. Sometimes you know what’s coming, and yet you don’t prepare. And so I would actually call that strategic failure. What got me to this company was it was the only company that I saw bringing together all of the pieces that you’ve seen today.
Obviously we wouldn’t have had a foundation to build upon without Dr. Monroe’s founding and without Chris Ballance carrying forward the compute piece. But what really excites me about the IonQ response to that strategic challenge are the applications
and the customers and the missions that you heard about, because one thing I learned as an intelligence professional: in many ways what we do doesn’t matter unless it affects a better decision on those we serve.
And I feel that same way about IonQ. We know we’re in a critical race. Jay, you talked about the national-security implications of it. But what compels me about this team is that it comes together in a way that reflects that outcome, that mission satisfaction, that drug discovery, that application of science in service of humanity and security that brought me here to IonQ.
Robert Cardillo, IonQ Board / former NGA 2:39:32 – 2:41:27
is the magic of the company. Jordan showed you some examples of how our applications are creating new insights in something called synthetic aperture radar, which by the way was a central theme of the business I used to run inside the government. We used to apply synthetic aperture radar against our adversaries to create more information about their capabilities and their intentions so that we could be better prepared, in the worst case.
And what I love about that model is it tells me, shows me what the value of IonQ is because what we’re really doing there is we’re taking an overwhelming — and I mean that word purposefully — amount of data and information. It’s kind of silly to tell an audience in Lower Manhattan that we live in a noisy world. We do. And it’s more and more difficult to do that synthesis between the noise and the signal.
And what we’re now able to do through applications is to do that synthesis for you and with you so that you can find signal. Ultimately, you can find answers. And so to me, what’s most exciting here about what the team’s doing is essentially providing what I call a coherence-from-chaos service. Finding the right info at the right time to make that better decision.
And to finish on where your question was going: if you think over the past twelve months since we were here last year, the teammates that we’ve invited, many of which you’ve seen today, have not just complemented, but they’ve truly scaled, and the executive order that Jay mentioned actually demands that piece, a scaled ecosystem, and I couldn’t be prouder to be part of a team that’s responding to that call.
Robert Cardillo, IonQ Board / former NGA 2:43:39 – 2:44:39
If I could just finish with a quick comment about the paper that was released today about the advances that our scientific team has developed along the lines of Shor’s algorithm. IonQ is a responsible, credible partner, obviously to our customers, but also to the governments that we work with. And I want to credit the whole IonQ team for the conversations that ensued.
Rick led many of them with the senior-most levels of our government because one, we didn’t want to surprise our partners in government. And two, we wanted to be responsible going forward on the safe-cracking part of it. And that, to me, that is the essence of being a good partner. And I know we’ve raised our reputational credibility with our most important customers, and we commit to that going forward.
Rick Muller, IonQ / formerly Sandia & IARPA
Rick Muller, IonQ / formerly Sandia & IARPA 2:35:04 – 2:37:12
I’m Rick Muller. I’ve spent a lot of my career doing technical development with the government as some sort of customer, either as a funding agency or ultimately when I was at IARPA as a destination, as a transition partner for what we were developing. And what you learn in that is that the government doesn’t want a qubit.
They want mission solutions to their hardest problems. And what IonQ brings to that is an amazing set of technologies and a broad platform of different capabilities that can be combined together to address the nation’s hardest mission challenges. The other side of that though is that the technologies alone don’t get you very far, and you learn that especially as a tech person.
I can tell you whether a qubit’s going to work or whether a clock can work or not, but it takes people that understand the mission well to understand what the value of those solutions are. And I think one of the things that IonQ builds is the team. I mean, you see who’s sharing the stage with me. I’ve complained that for the second year in a row I was completely upstaged by the people at Analyst Day that I shared a stage with.
But the point is that we’ve built a team that can take the best science and combine it with people that understand the mission well, and create really important solutions that are targeted at the hardest problems. And for someone who does this kind of work, that’s just an amazingly personally gratifying place to be, and as a company I think that’s a very solid business model.
Rick Muller, IonQ / formerly Sandia & IARPA 2:41:49 – 2:43:37
Yeah. So getting back to why ions in this context. Ions are quantum particles. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Chris Monroe, Professor Monroe, for many years. And one of the ways that he argued for ions was that they’re just naturally identical qubits, and they’re naturally quantum particles, and because they are natural quantum particles that we can control classically, we can do a lot of the things that people have talked about today.
That means we can build low-cost solutions that consume low power, that can be scaled very rapidly, and what that gives you is not just some anonymous quantum service that you log in to some anonymous host, but that gives you a solution that can be deployed locally or deployed remotely, that is your own solution to a lot of these technical problems.
And I think that’s the oldest technology that IonQ has, and I think it is uniquely capable of delivering high-trust solutions to sovereign nations and to companies and to ultimately individuals who need to be able to use that capability.
Part III — Presentation Materials: Status and Speaker Map
IonQ posted a live and archive webcast for Investor Day 2026 but did not publish the slide deck used on stage. The 8-K filed that day, Accession No. 0001193125-26-384388, contains only the guidance press release as Exhibit 99.1 and no presentation exhibit. Because the 2026 speaker decks are not public, no deck is reproduced in this volume and none has been reconstructed.
[FACT] What follows under the speaker map is a description of what was on the boards in the room, inferred from spoken slide cues — “this slide,” “this page,” “the chart,” “the orange circle.” These are descriptions of what speakers referred to, not copies of any file, and they should not be cited as slide content.
Official materials that are public
Item | Location |
Investor Day 2026 webcast | vimeo.com/event/6063489 |
IonQ events and presentations | investors.ionq.com/events-and-presentations |
Guidance 8-K, Exhibit 99.1 | SEC Accession No. 0001193125-26-384388 |
Closest published decks — not the September 8, 2026 room slides
2025 Analyst Day deck, September 12, 2025. Q2 2026 earnings slides, August 5, 2026. Investor overview, May 2026. All three are on IonQ’s Q4 CDN file server and are linked from the events page above. They are listed here because they are the nearest public approximations of the visual material, not because they show what was presented.
Appendix A — The Subject Digest
This index reorganizes the event by subject and reproduces the spoken material under each heading, so that a reader working on one question can read what was said about it without going back through three hours of proceedings. Every citation carries its passage. The citation form is the one used throughout the series — speaker name followed by the timestamp of that turn — so [Sonderman 31:11] resolves to a block in Part I and to the same block regrouped under that speaker in Part II, where the full remarks stand.
Passages are verbatim. What appears under a heading is the part of that turn which carries the subject, not the whole turn: where two passages from one turn are given and they were not consecutive, an ellipsis marks the gap. Nothing has been paraphrased, reordered or joined across speakers. Where a passage reads as though it begins or ends mid-sentence, that is the underlying record, which cuts at turn boundaries.
The twenty-three categories are the series’ standing analytical framework, not IonQ’s, and they are the same set used to index these proceedings elsewhere in the coverage of the event. A turn appearing under several categories is intentional cross-referencing rather than duplication: a customer deployment that is also a sovereign relationship and also a networking result is filed under all three, because a reader arriving from any of those directions needs to find it.
Citations run in event order within each category. The relative weight of these lists is itself a reading of the event: where a category is thin, the room spent little of its three hours there.
I. Financial results, guidance and segment reporting · 16 passages
II. Corporate structure, M&A and integration · 17 passages
III. Quantum computing hardware and the Superion roadmap · 34 passages
IV. Error correction, algorithms and the software stack · 11 passages
V. Semiconductor manufacturing and the quantum foundry · 28 passages
VI. Integrated photonics and interconnects · 15 passages
VII. Quantum networking · 15 passages
VIII. Quantum security and cryptography · 17 passages
IX. Quantum sensing, PNT and timing · 8 passages
X. Space, remote sensing and Earth intelligence · 11 passages
XI. Government, defense and national security · 22 passages
XII. Sovereign and international · 8 passages
XIII. Life sciences, healthcare and pharmaceuticals · 6 passages
XIV. Energy and utilities · 4 passages
XV. Enterprise software, financial services and AI convergence · 16 passages
XVI. Industrials, logistics, oil and gas · 6 passages
XVII. Go-to-market, customers and commercial motion · 32 passages
XVIII. Merchant supply and the industry-enablement business · 9 passages
XIX. Talent, organization and leadership · 24 passages
XX. Academic, workforce and regional ecosystem · 12 passages
XXI. Competitive positioning claims · 13 passages
XXII. Forward-looking statements and dated commitments · 18 passages
XXIII. Analyst questions from the floor · 7 passages
I. Financial results, guidance and segment reporting
Revenue, guidance, the SkyWater bridge, cost, capital and what things were paid for.
de Masi 4:40 This year, even before SkyWater closed, we were on track to do the better part of three hundred million dollars of quantum platform revenue. … Andrew’s going to talk a bit later about our guidance uplift for the day, and you can see that IonQ will continue to outperform quarter on quarter as we have done since our IPO.
Singh 47:01 That is the consensus that existed on July 30th, the day before the closing, and then on our second-quarter earnings call, for those of you who listened, I said of their revenue, a hundred and twenty million comes from us. … Gross margin, some of you asked me about, and gross margin sometimes doesn’t always capture that, so we talk about revenue and EBITDA margin, because that captures R&D and a bunch of other things.
Choksi 1:09:29 Probably for Thomas, maybe for Chris, but the reduction in cycle time from eight months to two months is absolutely astounding.
Sonderman 1:11:46 So I think the cost per qubit you will see from SkyWater and IonQ continue to be industry leading.
Singh 1:18:35 And we intend to keep investing, obviously, in the quantum foundry. … But from a capital standpoint, we bring capital to the table that SkyWater needs to grow its quantum foundry.
Sonderman 1:21:05 It’s very conducive to the types of work that we’re doing, and semiconductor manufacturing is an expensive business, and having the economies of scale that you get by having a volume facility is a nice balance to that, and again, it’s all about lowering the cost per qubit.
Rakesh 1:27:01 And if you can give us some idea on how to look at fiscal 27, I guess, between the core IonQ and the SkyWater, right?
Singh 1:28:56 We are lowering our own cost, starting with the lowest cost to begin with, and over the next few years, we need to make strategic decisions about how much of that margin we want to keep and share with our customers, right? … So as we map out our next five years and think about investing for the next five years, absolutely, we’re laser focused on ensuring that we deliver total cost of ownership advantage for the customer and then margin expansion for us.
Ho 1:40:01 SkyWater not only provides us a predictable unit economics for manufacturing, which is required for us to underwrite, investors to underwrite manufacturing at scale, but moreover, it’s also located in the heartland.
Sakac 1:42:36 They ask how long will it take to get to a solution that’s valuable for my workload, and what are the economics. … 2025 Google/Caltech paper is at a scale more than a Superion 20K could do; we could do it with a 100K, or with five 20K systems in parallel, pulling a workload forward two years — hundreds of millions of NPV.
Long 2:02:32 We have a full fiber network in the Chattanooga area, and we are picking around the quarter when our IonQ Forte Enterprise system will be fully commissioned.
de Masi 2:07:02 It was very memorable because this is a man who is not only a polymath and R&D researcher of the year actually in ’24, but also a capitalist. … We are a physicist, but we are a capitalist.
Long 2:08:09 We’re continuing to invest, pull investors into Chattanooga, make our computer available physically in our quantum center or via the cloud. We have a very supportive city and county as well as a state government that wants to invest behind quantum to make Chattanooga and Tennessee a leader.
de Masi 2:19:59 Undersecretary Butti has been an important bridge between the US and Italy, fostering stronger transatlantic ties in technology innovation and investment.
Butti 2:21:37 We welcome companies such as IonQ Italia, led by Marco Pistoia, bringing global quantum expertise to Italy and investing in talent, research and universities. … To the entire IonQ team, I wish you every success for Investor Day and look forward to the next chapter of our cooperation.
Muller 2:41:49 That means we can build low-cost solutions that consume low power, that can be scaled very rapidly, and what that gives you is not just some anonymous quantum service that you log in to some anonymous host, but that gives you a solution that can be deployed locally or deployed remotely, that is your own solution to a lot of these technical problems.
II. Corporate structure, M&A and integration
The acquisitions, how they closed, and how the parts are being fitted together.
de Masi 4:40 It took us seven months to get that deal closed, and it is hugely historic, and I’m excited about the fact that we are not only the largest quantum company in history, but we’re the first one that is vertically integrated. … It’s a system that is upgradable, a system that’s accessible through the cloud and through sovereign systems, and best of all, it’s a system that’s all been accelerated and all gone onto the SkyWater chips that we now fully integrate with, and our friend Tom Sonderman runs.
Singh 1:12:19 And Chris and I, when we did the Oxford acquisition, we’ll remember this, but there are other foundries that were trying to be quantum foundries also, and we talked to one of them — I won’t name them — and they couldn’t move fast enough.
Sonderman 1:13:58 Anduril is out there, you know, they bought HRL, but again, IBM sold their microelectronics business to GlobalFoundries back in 2015.
Ballance 1:20:02 Accelerate our roadmap is by working across many different aspects of the technology in parallel, then integrating more and more of this. … So the result of all of that is that we feel very confident in achieving the ultimate integrated performance on these systems.
Singh 1:22:07 When Niccolò and I were looking at the acquisition, this is one of the things I went into the calculus of: do we need to have more than one fab?
Ballance 1:23:45 So first of all, I should say, and this is something I mean, it’s a point of pride, it’s not a quantum problem, it’s an integration problem. … The challenge here is a classic technology system-integration problem.
Shapiro 1:25:01 And you’re right, customers are approaching us and asking not just for one part of the platform, but for integrated solutions, and that is virtually global, in every country around the globe, and virtually in every area, every industry. We’re seeing customers come to us asking about integrated technologies and solutions.
Rakesh 1:27:01 You had made an acquisition of Nexus Photonics, just wondering how that fits into the IonQ and SkyWater roadmap.
Bhaskar 1:27:36 SkyWater has the ability to manufacture, and Nexus brings a proven pedigree, intellectual property capability for design and integration of integrated photonic solutions. So combining them together means we can take, in particular, photonics solutions, which are required for most — many modalities of quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, whether it’s ions, atoms, photonics, networks, sensors, and take the complexity of hand-assembled systems and integrate those components on a chip.
Shapiro 1:28:48 And we have an example of one such photonic integrated circuit for our sensing unit that’s in the showcase over here as well.
de Masi 1:30:39 I’d like to move on now to hear Bhaskar, who’s going to talk about our quantum foundry, and more on integrated photonics.
Bhaskar 1:31:00 We actually took a fundamentally new approach, which we talked about last year, through the acquisition and integration of Lightsynq technology, which is a quantum memory. … So the first one on integrated photonics — there was a question about how Nexus Photonics really fits in here — so I’m really honored and thrilled to be joined by a luminary in the field of integrated photonics, Professor John Bowers.
Martinis 1:37:17 We’re very excited that IonQ acquired SkyWater and are helping with extra focus to work on quantum computing, and we think that that’s a very good partnership and acquisition, and it helps SkyWater be able to focus build new capabilities in their fabrication to properly scale up quantum computers and build them properly.
Sakac 1:42:36 Customers who bought Aria and Forte bought Tempo and want Superion cloud access.
Lokada 2:01:46 I think it’s really important to note that the way we’re looking at this is looking at two lanes.
Raymond 2:37:39 And if you look at what we did in establishing Space Force, we took the vast majority — were like me, they came out of the Air Force — but we also brought together people from the Army and the Navy and the Marines, and we brought people from off the street and out of colleges and out of the academies, and we had to integrate these people all together into one high-functioning team that our nation required.
de Masi 2:45:40 You’ve seen us add a quantum foundry and be very deliberate about how we expand integrated photonics so we can provide more value to our nation’s quantum ecosystem, to our allies’ quantum ecosystem, so that they can go faster. And you’ve heard clearly from Thomas and myself since we announced the SkyWater merger that our commitment to supporting existing SkyWater customers as well as new ones when it comes to everything from the best members of the team, as well as of course unparalleled IP protections, is absolute.
III. Quantum computing hardware and the Superion roadmap
The Superion line, the chip, the architecture, and the path from 256 to ten thousand qubits.
de Masi 4:40 Now, Chris is going to talk a lot more about our roadmap, but hopefully you all had a chance to walk by our models out front, our actual models, our actual chips out front of our generations of systems. … And so without further ado, I’m going to close on our final announcement from this morning, which is that we’ve rolled out our new quantum computing platform line of products, which we’ve aptly named the Superion systems and the Superion line, and we believe that that’s appropriate because they are going to be the world’s most powerful machines.
Ballance 18:36 What this is allowing us to do is to take these unit cells of electronic qubit control, these unit cells where we’ve achieved over four nines on the critical performance metric, two-qubit gate fidelity, and take these into scaled-out arrays of qubits. … To get to the next scaling node, we tile two dies together in two-and-a-half-D integration, and we carry on to hundreds of thousands of qubits by tiling out to more dies and by increasing the density of qubits on each die.
Sonderman 31:11 And one thing that has happened recently with the partnership between SkyWater and IonQ is we’ve moved out of the physics demonstration realm to now manufacturing at scale in a highly developed operation that will allow us to not only deliver the speed required to get the cycles of learning necessary to drive the roadmap that Chris just showed, but also the scale. … We have the capabilities in the front end in Minnesota, the capabilities in Florida, and as Chris alluded to, it’s all about scaling and tiling, which is heterogeneous integration.
Shapiro 36:47 The first is that the analysis of how many qubits you need to reach Q-Day, or the day when a quantum computer will pose a threat to our critical infrastructure, is coming down precipitously. … We previously announced that we were the first company in an enterprise setting to interconnect two different quantum computers together, two IonQ trapped-ion systems with our partners at Air Force Research Lab, or AFRL.
Singh 47:01 He talked about the 256 chip and the 10K chip, and it doesn’t stop there. … We are increasing from the Aria to the Superion 10K, our qubit system count four hundred times.
McPeak 1:08:17 At what number of physical qubits does photonic quantum interconnect become important, in your roadmap?
Ballance 1:08:42 So in our core compute roadmap, we can scale out well beyond millions of qubits. … Right now, on the core compute roadmap, we don’t need photonic networking.
Sonderman 1:11:46 So I think the cost per qubit you will see from SkyWater and IonQ continue to be industry leading.
Mobley 1:13:05 So from those other eight, what have the conversations been like with respect to their comfort in dealing with you as a foundry partner to making sure that you won’t essentially handicap their roadmap.
Sonderman 1:13:58 So the way we treat any customer is we compartmentalize the information, we don’t cross-contaminate, and all of our customers and the audience here should be a hundred percent confident that their roadmap won’t be impeded by the needs of IonQ.
Analyst 1:16:18 I have no doubts of scale-up and the applications, but I’m just wondering if you guys have a scale-out roadmap for the photonic interconnect, phase three and four.
Singh 1:18:35 And this accelerating our roadmap and our learning curve helps, frankly, the other players as well.
Bolton 1:19:09 Chris, you mentioned you’re starting to load the 256 QPU with ions. I guess can you talk about when will you have enough data to talk about gate fidelity, median gate fidelity across the two hundred and fifty-six qubits in that QPU?
Ballance 1:20:02 Accelerate our roadmap is by working across many different aspects of the technology in parallel, then integrating more and more of this.
Sonderman 1:21:05 It’s very conducive to the types of work that we’re doing, and semiconductor manufacturing is an expensive business, and having the economies of scale that you get by having a volume facility is a nice balance to that, and again, it’s all about lowering the cost per qubit.
Ellis 1:22:45 So Chris, as we look out to the end of the decade at your roadmap, and we see the scale-up to billions of qubits, tiling gets really important. Can you help us understand the technology competencies you’ll need to have to execute in that part of the roadmap.
Ballance 1:23:45 So the question I heard was on tiling, what are the technologies needed to do that? … When we look at what we need to do to tile these devices together, it’s about die bonding with tight enough tolerances and then designing the transfer, which is an electrostatic phenomenon, right?
Rakesh 1:27:01 You had made an acquisition of Nexus Photonics, just wondering how that fits into the IonQ and SkyWater roadmap. And also, for Inder, I guess, how do you look at the 256-qubit systems?
Bhaskar 1:27:36 So combining them together means we can take, in particular, photonics solutions, which are required for most — many modalities of quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, whether it’s ions, atoms, photonics, networks, sensors, and take the complexity of hand-assembled systems and integrate those components on a chip. … Taking the most complex parts and putting them on a chip is what Nexus allows us to do.
Singh 1:28:56 There isn’t another company with a 256 chip out there, period. … And the number of logical qubits that’ll be delivered because of the ion-trap technology just gives us an inherent advantage.
Bhaskar 1:31:00 We took our quantum computing system, our trapped ions, and we connected it to this quantum memory in order to really use a new architecture, a heterogeneous architecture, a device optimized for computing and a device optimized for networking working together to create a system that’s better than the sum of its individual parts. … SkyWater also serves a number of customers that build superconducting technology, and we’re very, very excited today to also announce a partnership with a leading superconducting qubit company, Qolab, which is co-founded by, and a CTO of this company is Nobel laureate Dr.
Martinis 1:37:17 I was a co-developer of qubit technology in the 1980s, and I’ve been excited to see the transition from a fundamental physics experiment to something that we want to make useful in the next few years.
Bhaskar 1:39:29 As a physicist, it’s personally very exciting to get to work with Dr.
Bhaskar 1:42:03 And just to conclude and move on to the next section, I hope you can see how, whether it’s through the scale- out solutions or the scale-up semiconductor ecosystem, all of the roads to scaling quantum are running through the team in this room.
Sakac 1:42:36 We used Forte Enterprise and Tempo hardware on 12 then 14 amino acids. … Customers who bought Aria and Forte bought Tempo and want Superion cloud access.
Long 2:02:32 We have a full fiber network in the Chattanooga area, and we are picking around the quarter when our IonQ Forte Enterprise system will be fully commissioned.
Rabinowitz 2:03:45 There are problems in AI where we still don’t really understand whether we are limited by the data that’s available or we’re limited by the architectures and finding the global minimum of those architectures. … That’s an incredibly powerful concept if you can apply it to the challenges we have in AI architectures today.
Long 2:08:09 We are the local power utility and generally maybe not thought about with quantum, but to be able to leverage our full fiber network — ten years ago we partnered with Oak Ridge National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, as well as Qubitekk, now in the IonQ family, and worked on and successfully tested QKD across a 21-kilometer span on our fiber network.
Rabinowitz 2:12:54 I never dreamed at the time that you could do these incredible things with deep learning neural-network architectures if you trained them, these transformer and convolutional network architectures, on the entire internet of information just to predict the next word in a sentence. … Training a whole LLM on a quantum architecture is still on the come, but if you do the fine- tuning with a quantum architecture, you take the embedding from the deep-learning architecture.
Muller 2:35:04 And what you learn in that is that the government doesn’t want a qubit. … I can tell you whether a qubit’s going to work or whether a clock can work or not, but it takes people that understand the mission well to understand what the value of those solutions are.
de Masi 2:37:13 Rick’s the only one of the four of us that has a PhD in ion trapping, but Robert and Jay have run much larger organizations, and I’ve appreciated their counsel and mentoring on how to do a good job of that as we continue scaling.
Cardillo 2:39:32 Jordan showed you some examples of how our applications are creating new insights in something called synthetic aperture radar, which by the way was a central theme of the business I used to run inside the government.
Muller 2:41:49 And one of the ways that he argued for ions was that they’re just naturally identical qubits, and they’re naturally quantum particles, and because they are natural quantum particles that we can control classically, we can do a lot of the things that people have talked about today.
de Masi 2:45:40 It has been an overwhelming privilege to watch our team grow, watch our team perform, and watch our company not just scale, but hit technical milestones as we promised, and as importantly, I would argue even more importantly, hit our commercial milestones, time and time again.
IV. Error correction, algorithms and the software stack
Error correction, decoding, algorithms and the layers sitting above the hardware.
de Masi 4:40 Some of the things that I’m proudest of is not just the fact that we’ve quintupled our revenue year on year, and not just the fact that we launched the world’s first fault tolerant architecture that’s shovel ready — our Walking Cat paper in April — and not just that we’re in three DARPA programs, HARK, About Time, and of course QBI, but we’ve done exciting things on the interconnect and the networking front also.
Ballance 18:36 For the last thirty years, Shor’s algorithm has been the benchmark for scaled fault-tolerant quantum computing. … Working at the level such as this where we’ve made significant innovations across the stack shows on the benchmark problem like Shor’s that’s been so well studied that we can make innovations across the entire stack of fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Analyst 1:16:18 And also, the other thing, so as we have the applications in shorter cycles, I believe we need to have capabilities of both little manufacturing capabilities.
Singh 1:18:35 And we intend to keep investing, obviously, in the quantum foundry.
Ballance 1:20:02 In fact, over to the side here, you can see a lot of the different short loops that de-risk different parts of the technology.
Shapiro 1:28:48 And we have an example of one such photonic integrated circuit for our sensing unit that’s in the showcase over here as well.
Sakac 1:42:36 One of those workloads where we’re about 1,000 to 10,000 times faster is a quantum Fourier transform, which shows up in Shor’s algorithm. … Example: quantum algorithms improving LLM behavior, 24 percent better accuracy, lower time to solution, better energy efficiency.
de Masi 2:00:02 You guys have a computer, you have a network, you’re running your own applications, your own algorithms, as you just heard from Chad.
Long 2:02:32 As Chad mentioned, we have eight fellows via this grant, and we leverage the IonQ training platform to train our fellows, and we are writing our own algorithms and running our own programs to service the energy needs of the industry.
Rabinowitz 2:12:54 Those are the kind of problems where there’s hope that with these quantum algorithms you can be selecting your neoantigens more effectively.
Cardillo 2:43:39 If I could just finish with a quick comment about the paper that was released today about the advances that our scientific team has developed along the lines of Shor’s algorithm.
V. Semiconductor manufacturing and the quantum foundry
The foundry: nodes, wafers, packaging, yield, and what SkyWater brings to the roadmap.
Promotional video 3:08 Trusted US manufacturing, faster innovation, a stronger foundation for long term national security and economic competition. … SkyWater and IonQ ushering in the next frontier of quantum innovation.
de Masi 4:40 You’re going to hear a lot about our foundry capabilities this afternoon from my colleagues, not just Mihir Bhaskar, but Tom Sonderman, who runs SkyWater to this day. … So we’re focused on building our ecosystem, expanding our ecosystem, and delivering these machines at an access point, price point, power consumption point, manufacturable space consumption point that hopefully every company, every government in the world can invest in, because of the fact that we do what we say we’re going to do at IonQ, and we tell you the next generation of systems will roll out, and we’ll go from two, fifty-six to ten K to twenty K, two hundred K.
Ballance 18:36 We’re already producing these devices at scale at SkyWater by the wafer. … It’s simple, it’s scalable, it’s mass manufacturable, and we’re building this in our sovereign fab today.
Sonderman 31:11 So today, with the speed, accuracy, and agility that we bring together, coupled with front-end manufacturing and advanced packaging, we now have a capability that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world, and we’ve been doing it for over ten years. … Quantum is sovereign infrastructure, and it’s absolutely critical that SkyWater, IonQ and the quantum foundry model that we created protects the IP for our customers, and more importantly, protects our national security for things tied to the defense of our country.
Singh 47:01 And the quantum foundry and advanced technologies is where we manufacture our quantum computing devices and the chips that you saw that are in the room there, as well as some of the most advanced things that only SkyWater can do for government customers over time that are cleared to work on secret projects, things that you don’t have a clearance to know, things that go boom and other things I’m not going to get into.
Choksi 1:09:29 I would love to get more insight on how you guys have achieved that, and I’m thinking one element may be which lithography node IonQ is working SkyWater with, and you know what range of lithography nodes does SkyWater work with as
Ballance 1:10:04 At the time, a major industrial foundry and SkyWater. The major industrial foundry was pushing out the delivery timelines for some hardware by a couple of months, six months out, since they had challenges with supply chain getting particular chemicals to put in particular machines that deposited particular layers.
Sonderman 1:11:46 The kinds of fabrication that we’re doing in a 200-millimeter fab, very mature environment, is very nicely adaptable to the kinds of innovations that Chris has. So I think the cost per qubit you will see from SkyWater and IonQ continue to be industry leading.
Mobley 1:13:05 So from those other eight, what have the conversations been like with respect to their comfort in dealing with you as a foundry partner to making sure that you won’t essentially handicap their roadmap. And how much of a time lead do you think you have vis- à-vis IBM and others or GlobalFoundries QTS before they hit their milestones and become a real alternative to SkyWater?
Sonderman 1:13:58 Yeah, so the whole quantum foundry model is really based on the foundry model, which is you manufacture parts for other companies, and protecting IP is foundational to that.
Analyst 1:16:18 And also, the other thing, so as we have the applications in shorter cycles, I believe we need to have capabilities of both little manufacturing capabilities.
Sonderman 1:17:18 Eventually, products will go into volume manufacturing, and we will continue to innovate in parallel. … And it was great to see both Inder and Chris say we looked at all the other foundries, and we chose SkyWater because it validates the model.
de Masi 1:18:30 There’s a section on quantum foundry and networking actually when we’re done here.
Singh 1:18:35 But from a capital standpoint, we bring capital to the table that SkyWater needs to grow its quantum foundry. Again, I don’t think of the others as competitors that are in that foundry.
Bolton 1:19:09 And then for Tom, just can you discuss plans for Fab 25? Does that stay sort of a quasi-independent CMOS high-volume fab for non-quantum customers, or do you see a time where you might start to run some of the quantum wafers at Fab 25.
Ballance 1:20:02 The net of this is that a tremendous amount of the work we’ve been doing over the last twelve months, and that SkyWater has been assisting us with, is building out lots of very fast-turn prototype deriskers to de-risk each one of these different elements faster.
Sonderman 1:21:05 The complement of having a secure manufacturing facility and advanced packaging facility is important because that allows us to focus on the innovation side and also have a place where customers can migrate out of the Minnesota fab into, you know, say, a Texas fab. … It’s very conducive to the types of work that we’re doing, and semiconductor manufacturing is an expensive business, and having the economies of scale that you get by having a volume facility is a nice balance to that, and again, it’s all about lowering the cost per qubit.
Singh 1:22:07 And for us, it’s a great — I mean, we have not had to go into the Texas fab to do quantum, but there’s optionality. When Niccolò and I were looking at the acquisition, this is one of the things I went into the calculus of: do we need to have more than one fab?
Ballance 1:23:45 These are classic semiconductor industry problems, and these are the kind of things that SkyWater has put a lot of focus in understanding how to do.
Rakesh 1:27:01 You had made an acquisition of Nexus Photonics, just wondering how that fits into the IonQ and SkyWater roadmap. … And if you can give us some idea on how to look at fiscal 27, I guess, between the core IonQ and the SkyWater, right?
Bhaskar 1:27:36 SkyWater has the ability to manufacture, and Nexus brings a proven pedigree, intellectual property capability for design and integration of integrated photonic solutions. … We’re packaging them basically at the level that you can package these discrete elements, but there’s still wires and things coming out.
de Masi 1:30:39 I’d like to move on now to hear Bhaskar, who’s going to talk about our quantum foundry, and more on integrated photonics.
Bhaskar 1:31:00 And so while others have talked about a quantum foundry, Tom told you about how SkyWater has been actually delivering wafers for over a decade. … So the Nexus technology, the designs, the intellectual property, the integration know-how is what allows you to take that complexity and put it on a single chip at a fraction of the size, weight, power, cost, and with much higher manufacturability and yield and reliability.
Martinis 1:37:17 We have most of the science understood, but I think right now what we’re trying to do is figure out how to go from that to build a manufacturable system and a system that works better, scaled up, build a useful quantum computer. … We’re very excited that IonQ acquired SkyWater and are helping with extra focus to work on quantum computing, and we think that that’s a very good partnership and acquisition, and it helps SkyWater be able to focus build new capabilities in their fabrication to properly scale up quantum computers and build them properly.
Bhaskar 1:39:29 Martinis, but I think strategically, you should ask yourself when you think about the quantum foundry, where are the leaders and luminaries in the field choosing to build their quantum technologies?
Ho 1:40:01 SkyWater not only provides us a predictable unit economics for manufacturing, which is required for us to underwrite, investors to underwrite manufacturing at scale, but moreover, it’s also located in the heartland. … Now, the reason why I’m so proud of this is because having a quantum manufacturing ecosystem in the Midwest is a resilient quantum manufacturing ecosystem for America.
Sakac 1:42:36 Fast forward December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers create the first human-powered flight, a glorious 12 seconds, with a plane where there was only one manufactured in the world.
de Masi 2:45:40 You’ve seen us add a quantum foundry and be very deliberate about how we expand integrated photonics so we can provide more value to our nation’s quantum ecosystem, to our allies’ quantum ecosystem, so that they can go faster. And you’ve heard clearly from Thomas and myself since we announced the SkyWater merger that our commitment to supporting existing SkyWater customers as well as new ones when it comes to everything from the best members of the team, as well as of course unparalleled IP protections, is absolute.
VI. Integrated photonics and interconnects
Photonics, lasers, optical integration and the interconnect.
Ballance 18:36 In the Superion platform, we replace these lasers for qubit control with electronics built into the chip — electronic qubit control. This allows us to take out this whole middle layer of laser control, directly connecting our classical control electronics to our quantum chip, and allows us to build out these quantum chips in standard semiconductor ways.
Shapiro 36:47 We previously announced that we were the first company in an enterprise setting to interconnect two different quantum computers together, two IonQ trapped-ion systems with our partners at Air Force Research Lab, or AFRL. … Now we are working on the next step, which is to take our network which is fiber-based today and leverage IonQ’s optical communication technology to get off the fiber.
McPeak 1:08:17 At what number of physical qubits does photonic quantum interconnect become important, in your roadmap?
Ballance 1:08:42 So right now, we don’t believe we need photonic interconnects in the near term for that. The customers that like photonic interconnects are typically not the customers who just want one big computer.
Analyst 1:16:18 I have no doubts of scale-up and the applications, but I’m just wondering if you guys have a scale-out roadmap for the photonic interconnect, phase three and four. From my understanding, photonic interconnect phase four is really, really complicated to make it.
Rakesh 1:27:01 You had made an acquisition of Nexus Photonics, just wondering how that fits into the IonQ and SkyWater roadmap.
de Masi 1:27:29 Right, let’s have Mihir answer the Nexus question, because he’s the next presenter and he’s going to answer a little more of these questions even in depth.
Bhaskar 1:27:36 SkyWater has the ability to manufacture, and Nexus brings a proven pedigree, intellectual property capability for design and integration of integrated photonic solutions. So combining them together means we can take, in particular, photonics solutions, which are required for most — many modalities of quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, whether it’s ions, atoms, photonics, networks, sensors, and take the complexity of hand-assembled systems and integrate those components on a chip.
Shapiro 1:28:48 And we have an example of one such photonic integrated circuit for our sensing unit that’s in the showcase over here as well.
de Masi 1:30:39 I’d like to move on now to hear Bhaskar, who’s going to talk about our quantum foundry, and more on integrated photonics.
Bhaskar 1:31:00 So the first one on integrated photonics — there was a question about how Nexus Photonics really fits in here — so I’m really honored and thrilled to be joined by a luminary in the field of integrated photonics, Professor John Bowers. He pioneered the development of putting laser systems on a chip, and without that, we really wouldn’t have the massive scale- out of today’s AI data centers, the optical interconnects that are connecting GPUs and computing devices.
Bhaskar 1:39:29 Bowers in the audience who I encourage you to meet later, or whether it’s Dr.
Long 2:02:32 We have a full fiber network in the Chattanooga area, and we are picking around the quarter when our IonQ Forte Enterprise system will be fully commissioned.
de Masi 2:07:02 Janet at EPB and her predecessor used to analogize being early to quantum the same way you guys thought about being early to the fastest fiber network in the country.
Long 2:08:09 We are the local power utility and generally maybe not thought about with quantum, but to be able to leverage our full fiber network — ten years ago we partnered with Oak Ridge National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, as well as Qubitekk, now in the IonQ family, and worked on and successfully tested QKD across a 21-kilometer span on our fiber network. We took that as continued drive to fully build out our fiber network with quantum, as well as add the quantum computer.
VII. Quantum networking
Networking: entanglement, quantum memory, fiber, and the Chattanooga deployment.
Promotional video 3:08 Where does America stand in the race for quantum advantage?
de Masi 4:40 Some of the things that I’m proudest of is not just the fact that we’ve quintupled our revenue year on year, and not just the fact that we launched the world’s first fault tolerant architecture that’s shovel ready — our Walking Cat paper in April — and not just that we’re in three DARPA programs, HARK, About Time, and of course QBI, but we’ve done exciting things on the interconnect and the networking front also. … And we’re doing this through progress in our photonic unit and progress through our quantum networking, quantum memory business that we acquired with Lightsynq last year.
Shapiro 36:47 We then have announced that we are providing AFRL with a quantum network for entanglement distribution that allows us to experiment with different modalities of quantum computers on the same network and different quantum devices that can be connected together. … Our US government customers are validating our technologies, whether they be our quantum computing platform with DARPA QBI, our quantum sensors, most recently the fifty-eight million dollar agreement for the It’s About Time program, but also our networks and our space technology, recent contract with NRO as well on the space side.
Ballance 1:08:42 Right now, on the core compute roadmap, we don’t need photonic networking.
de Masi 1:18:30 There’s a section on quantum foundry and networking actually when we’re done here.
Bhaskar 1:27:36 So combining them together means we can take, in particular, photonics solutions, which are required for most — many modalities of quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, whether it’s ions, atoms, photonics, networks, sensors, and take the complexity of hand-assembled systems and integrate those components on a chip.
Bhaskar 1:31:00 We actually took a fundamentally new approach, which we talked about last year, through the acquisition and integration of Lightsynq technology, which is a quantum memory. We took our quantum computing system, our trapped ions, and we connected it to this quantum memory in order to really use a new architecture, a heterogeneous architecture, a device optimized for computing and a device optimized for networking working together to create a system that’s better than the sum of its individual parts.
Sakac 1:42:36 Networking is not a prerequisite, but pulling work forward has immense economic value. … EPB started in networking, expanded to computing; system being commissioned; expanding into quantum memories in Chattanooga.
de Masi 2:00:02 Robert Long is the President of Strategic Initiatives at EPB, and Dr. … You guys have a computer, you have a network, you’re running your own applications, your own algorithms, as you just heard from Chad.
Lokada 2:01:46 I think it’s really important to note that the way we’re looking at this is looking at two lanes.
Long 2:02:32 We have a full fiber network in the Chattanooga area, and we are picking around the quarter when our IonQ Forte Enterprise system will be fully commissioned. So we have the first nationally available quantum network, as well as the first commercially available quantum computer.
de Masi 2:07:02 Janet at EPB and her predecessor used to analogize being early to quantum the same way you guys thought about being early to the fastest fiber network in the country.
Long 2:08:09 With our quantum network and thinking of what we’re trying to build in Chattanooga, adding the quantum computer, we really want to have an ecosystem that builds within Chattanooga, centered around quantum, our network and our computer. We are the local power utility and generally maybe not thought about with quantum, but to be able to leverage our full fiber network — ten years ago we partnered with Oak Ridge National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, as well as Qubitekk, now in the IonQ family, and worked on and successfully tested QKD across a 21-kilometer span on our fiber network.
Rabinowitz 2:12:54 I never dreamed at the time that you could do these incredible things with deep learning neural-network architectures if you trained them, these transformer and convolutional network architectures, on the entire internet of information just to predict the next word in a sentence.
de Masi 2:45:40 You can see we’ve built multimodal networking, and we’ve led at that for a long time. … We look forward to remaining the largest quantum company in history and the leader, not just in quantum computing, but also quantum networking, quantum sensing, quantum security, and of course our foundry business.
VIII. Quantum security and cryptography
Quantum security, post-quantum migration and the Q-Day threshold.
Singh 0:00 On the left hand side, you’ll hear from a number of the leaders of the company about how we’re doing and how we’re executing, what our plans are, what our priorities are, and how we plan to keep on innovating in each of these areas, whether it’s in computing, in the security area, and a number of things, frankly, that three years ago people thought were like three decades away.
Promotional video 3:08 Computing, medicine, and security that will one day be a matter of the past. … Trusted US manufacturing, faster innovation, a stronger foundation for long term national security and economic competition.
de Masi 4:40 We’ve been passionate believers in the need for quantum security for years now, and we have the largest security practice. … So some of you might have seen that Anthropic’s had a lab leak, OpenAI’s had a lab leak, and Claude is going to town on some of the recommended PQC algorithms that are out there.
Sonderman 31:11 There are others that are talking about it, but recognize that what we put in place has been part of a strategy to not only create the environment, but create the security that protects those innovations. … Quantum is sovereign infrastructure, and it’s absolutely critical that SkyWater, IonQ and the quantum foundry model that we created protects the IP for our customers, and more importantly, protects our national security for things tied to the defense of our country.
Shapiro 36:47 Well, we offer customers quantum security posture management, or QSPM, which gives them visibility into their full infrastructure to determine where they are vulnerable to potential quantum attacks. Then we offer a CNSA 2.0 NIST-compliant solution that allows you to continue to update your infrastructure to be quantum secure, whether that be using PQC or post- quantum cryptography and injecting that throughout your infrastructure, or doing quantum key distribution, a physical solution that can span your entire network, but especially where it matters the most.
Singh 47:01 Manufacturing it in a way where the quantum products we create — and over time we’ll do more and more with SkyWater, but computing to begin with — make it secure from design to engineering to manufacturing to delivery to the customer.
Sonderman 1:21:05 The complement of having a secure manufacturing facility and advanced packaging facility is important because that allows us to focus on the innovation side and also have a place where customers can migrate out of the Minnesota fab into, you know, say, a Texas fab.
Shapiro 1:25:01 So financial companies, for example, any financial services firm — we’re in the heart, a financial heart here in New York — we are having conversations about financial applications of quantum computing, and then we’re hopping over to the security team to talk to the CISO about quantum security. Or in oil and gas, we’re talking about quantum chemistry solutions and also using PNT for finding new oil wells, and at the same time working on quantum security as well for critical infrastructure that oil and gas has.
Lokada 2:01:46 We are innately becoming more focused on the role of security into the future of workflows, which dovetails into the second opportunity that I believe is worth calling out, which is optimization. And I think there no longer can be two different lanes of security and optimization.
Long 2:02:32 So we’re making our systems available, and we are approaching different business aspects with those in the community and nationally, and really focusing on the energy grid, energy-grid optimization and energy security, and really utilizing pretty much the full stack of IonQ services.
de Masi 2:07:02 Because you can see that things are just inflecting, but whether it’s security or computing, this is really just a race that’s in its first inning.
Lokada 2:10:25 It’s process management, it’s workflows of the future, but as we start to become more future ready, we need to look beyond the letters PQC, and PQC is largely classical anyway. We need to understand how we can lead with security and how we can drive opportunities that absolutely make sense for modern-day GPUs, but when you need the QPUs there, you need the plumbing that can integrate between today and tomorrow.
Butti 2:21:37 It encompasses quantum communication and security, sensing, research, skills, and the development of a strong industrial ecosystem. … It can become a catalyst for innovation across manufacturing, aerospace and defense, life sciences, energy, cybersecurity, telecommunication, finance, and advanced materials.
de Masi 2:27:33 Okay, we are onto our final panel here, which is in the national-security space. … So we’re closing the day discussing our nation’s government and our allies and the perspective of these three gentlemen who have served our nation to a tremendous extent at a very high level, to discuss everything from quantum security through to the relevance of quantum computing on the continuation of your mission.
Cardillo 2:33:00 Jay, you talked about the national-security implications of it. But what compels me about this team is that it comes together in a way that reflects that outcome, that mission satisfaction, that drug discovery, that application of science in service of humanity and security that brought me here to IonQ.
Cardillo 2:43:39 And two, we wanted to be responsible going forward on the safe-cracking part of it.
Raymond 2:44:40 And I will tell you when you’re talking about national security —
IX. Quantum sensing, PNT and timing
Sensing, clocks, and position, navigation and timing.
Promotional video 3:08 Where does America stand in the race for quantum advantage?
Shapiro 36:47 We also produce time-transfer devices, atomic gravimeters that can measure the specific gravity at any point on the Earth, gyroscopes that measure inertial movement, and so we have a precise level of sensing that uses the same underlying quantum physics to build new devices and new capabilities, especially in the field of positioning, navigation, and timing, or PNT. … Our quantum clocks are a thousand times more accurate than the classical equivalent, best-in-class classical equivalent, and they lead the entire field in NIST’s ensemble of clocks, meaning that they’re the best performing clocks that NIST has available today in this form factor.
Singh 47:01 Certain government customers value the fact that you have sensing that doesn’t get jammed. … A Vector Atomic clock on a space platform is one of those solutions.
Shapiro 1:25:01 Take for example, just on the global side, we offer an incredibly compelling set of solutions to any sovereign nation that might want everything from advanced PNT to operate in GPS-denied environments, increasingly important in today’s geopolitical landscape, to the computing power that will change their economy for the better in the future. … Or in oil and gas, we’re talking about quantum chemistry solutions and also using PNT for finding new oil wells, and at the same time working on quantum security as well for critical infrastructure that oil and gas has.
Bhaskar 1:27:36 So combining them together means we can take, in particular, photonics solutions, which are required for most — many modalities of quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, whether it’s ions, atoms, photonics, networks, sensors, and take the complexity of hand-assembled systems and integrate those components on a chip. … Already we’re manufacturing more and more of these clocks and inertial navigation sensors.
Shapiro 1:28:48 And we have an example of one such photonic integrated circuit for our sensing unit that’s in the showcase over here as well.
Muller 2:35:04 I can tell you whether a qubit’s going to work or whether a clock can work or not, but it takes people that understand the mission well to understand what the value of those solutions are.
de Masi 2:45:40 We not only supply to the leading players in the quantum ecosystem, in the friendly world, things like atomic clocks, which are the most accurate in the world. … We look forward to remaining the largest quantum company in history and the leader, not just in quantum computing, but also quantum networking, quantum sensing, quantum security, and of course our foundry business.
X. Space, remote sensing and Earth intelligence
Space, satellites, synthetic aperture radar and Earth intelligence.
Singh 0:00 I joined Niccolò, our CEO, in the journey of making IonQ not only the pace setter of the industry that he’s made it, but also the only platform company in our space. … You have customers that will be joining on the right hand side, as you see, a number of panels to tell you what they’re focused on, how they’re using either the security solution from us or the computing solution from us or imaging from space using AI.
de Masi 4:40 I don’t know about you guys, but for most of my time in the quantum computing space, I remember a lecture of mine when I was in university, and I read Chris Monroe’s paper in ’95, ’94, the first quantum logic gate.
Shapiro 36:47 Today you’re seeing what is the first example to our knowledge of a hybrid quantum- classical workflow with SAR data, where we’re taking IonQ’s quantum computer, we’re putting it in the loop, and we’re processing data from our SAR platform. … Our US government customers are validating our technologies, whether they be our quantum computing platform with DARPA QBI, our quantum sensors, most recently the fifty-eight million dollar agreement for the It’s About Time program, but also our networks and our space technology, recent contract with NRO as well on the space side.
Singh 47:01 A Vector Atomic clock on a space platform is one of those solutions. Using quantum computing to improve the imaging from a SAR satellite is another one, and there are many more.
Martinis 1:37:17 And I think that transition is going to happen if scientists like myself, people in Qolab start collaborating with people in the manufacturing space, especially those who are doing semiconductor kind of fabrication.
de Masi 2:00:02 He is not only a very successful serial entrepreneur in the aeronautics space, but also in the AI space and the pharmaceutical biotech sector.
Long 2:08:09 They’ve announced a satellite office with 250 faculty or staff.
de Masi 2:27:33 Okay, we are onto our final panel here, which is in the national-security space. … He is the founder of the Space Force under the first Trump administration, and the only four-star general to be a four-star in two services since the Air Force was founded in 1947.
Raymond 2:30:47 As Niccolò said, I served about thirty-five and a half years in the Air Force and then transitioned over to the Space Force in 2019. As I reflect on the environment in 2019 as it relates to space, it was becoming — our nation was becoming much more reliant on space.
Raymond 2:37:39 And it was a team that operated, in my opinion, with the same integrity that I saw when I was in the Space Force or in military service. … And if you look at what we did in establishing Space Force, we took the vast majority — were like me, they came out of the Air Force — but we also brought together people from the Army and the Navy and the Marines, and we brought people from off the street and out of colleges and out of the academies, and we had to integrate these people all together into one high-functioning team that our nation required.
Cardillo 2:39:32 Jordan showed you some examples of how our applications are creating new insights in something called synthetic aperture radar, which by the way was a central theme of the business I used to run inside the government. We used to apply synthetic aperture radar against our adversaries to create more information about their capabilities and their intentions so that we could be better prepared, in the worst case.
XI. Government, defense and national security
Government, defense, and the national security customer.
Promotional video 3:08 Trusted US manufacturing, faster innovation, a stronger foundation for long term national security and economic competition. The recent US executive orders made one thing clear: the world needs a competitive quantum ecosystem.
de Masi 4:40 And it’s coming sooner than people think, and it’s coming inside the planning horizon of a CISO, whether or not you are in a government position, federal position, or an enterprise one.
Sonderman 31:11 Because our focus around quantum isn’t just as a commercial business, but also it’s tied to national security. Quantum is sovereign infrastructure, and it’s absolutely critical that SkyWater, IonQ and the quantum foundry model that we created protects the IP for our customers, and more importantly, protects our national security for things tied to the defense of our country.
Shapiro 36:47 We previously announced that we were the first company in an enterprise setting to interconnect two different quantum computers together, two IonQ trapped-ion systems with our partners at Air Force Research Lab, or AFRL. … Our US government customers are validating our technologies, whether they be our quantum computing platform with DARPA QBI, our quantum sensors, most recently the fifty-eight million dollar agreement for the It’s About Time program, but also our networks and our space technology, recent contract with NRO as well on the space side.
Singh 47:01 You know, when I joined Niccolò in this mission to help make this platform company into the pace setter that he’s made it — I take no credit for that — and also how much more we can accomplish here together as a team, he’s pulled together an amazing team.
Singh 1:12:19 They told us if — they were blown away by the volume numbers we were talking about into the future years, and they needed permission from the mothership, and they just move too slowly.
Sonderman 1:13:58 Anduril is out there, you know, they bought HRL, but again, IBM sold their microelectronics business to GlobalFoundries back in 2015.
Ellis 1:22:45 Is it more as a result of executive orders that hit in the US?
Long 2:02:32 We have a full fiber network in the Chattanooga area, and we are picking around the quarter when our IonQ Forte Enterprise system will be fully commissioned.
Long 2:08:09 We have a very supportive city and county as well as a state government that wants to invest behind quantum to make Chattanooga and Tennessee a leader.
Long 2:19:26 The government having the support and coordinating those efforts will absolutely pull forward the technology and continue to push the US to a leadership position in quantum.
de Masi 2:19:59 He’s been one of the leading voices behind Italy’s digital and technological transformation under Giorgia Meloni’s leadership, the longest-serving government I think Italy’s had since the war. … He’s been a strong advocate of collaboration between government, industry, and the research community, and he has brought together Italian scientific excellence and American technological leadership.
Butti 2:21:37 My responsibility is to look at the broader question: how can government, industry, and science work together so that transformative technology creates lasting economic and social value? … It can become a catalyst for innovation across manufacturing, aerospace and defense, life sciences, energy, cybersecurity, telecommunication, finance, and advanced materials.
de Masi 2:27:33 Rick Muller led the quantum program at Sandia National Labs for I think twenty-two years — you’ll correct me, slightly fewer, twenty-one — and then he became the director of IARPA before he joined IonQ about twelve, eighteen months ago. So we’re closing the day discussing our nation’s government and our allies and the perspective of these three gentlemen who have served our nation to a tremendous extent at a very high level, to discuss everything from quantum security through to the relevance of quantum computing on the continuation of your mission.
Raymond 2:30:47 As Niccolò said, I served about thirty-five and a half years in the Air Force and then transitioned over to the Space Force in 2019.
Cardillo 2:33:00 I had the privilege to serve almost four decades in the US government, all of that in our intelligence community, most of it in the geospatial-intelligence world that I was privileged to lead at the end of my career. … But what compels me about this team is that it comes together in a way that reflects that outcome, that mission satisfaction, that drug discovery, that application of science in service of humanity and security that brought me here to IonQ.
Muller 2:35:04 I’ve spent a lot of my career doing technical development with the government as some sort of customer, either as a funding agency or ultimately when I was at IARPA as a destination, as a transition partner for what we were developing. … But the point is that we’ve built a team that can take the best science and combine it with people that understand the mission well, and create really important solutions that are targeted at the hardest problems.
Raymond 2:37:39 And it was a team that operated, in my opinion, with the same integrity that I saw when I was in the Space Force or in military service. … And if you look at what we did in establishing Space Force, we took the vast majority — were like me, they came out of the Air Force — but we also brought together people from the Army and the Navy and the Marines, and we brought people from off the street and out of colleges and out of the academies, and we had to integrate these people all together into one high-functioning team that our nation required.
Cardillo 2:39:32 Jordan showed you some examples of how our applications are creating new insights in something called synthetic aperture radar, which by the way was a central theme of the business I used to run inside the government. … And to finish on where your question was going: if you think over the past twelve months since we were here last year, the teammates that we’ve invited, many of which you’ve seen today, have not just complemented, but they’ve truly scaled, and the executive order that Jay mentioned actually demands that piece, a scaled ecosystem, and I couldn’t be prouder to be part of a team that’s responding to that call.
de Masi 2:41:28 So look, just on that theme, and we got time for our last question here: sovereignty, trust, zero trust, obviously domestic supply chains, executive orders.
Cardillo 2:43:39 IonQ is a responsible, credible partner, obviously to our customers, but also to the governments that we work with. … Rick led many of them with the senior-most levels of our government because one, we didn’t want to surprise our partners in government.
Raymond 2:44:40 And I will tell you when you’re talking about national security —
XII. Sovereign and international
Sovereign relationships and the international footprint.
de Masi 4:40 Not only are we investing in driving merchant supply to accelerate the US industry and our allies, but we’re also speeding up our own roadmap because of this vertical integration. … It’s a system that is upgradable, a system that’s accessible through the cloud and through sovereign systems, and best of all, it’s a system that’s all been accelerated and all gone onto the SkyWater chips that we now fully integrate with, and our friend Tom Sonderman runs.
Singh 47:01 It’s a nation state probably, or more nation states, right? … I’m simplifying the number of categories that SkyWater had to a few, just as on the left I’ve given you color in terms of how we’re doing internationally, commercially, et cetera.
Shapiro 1:25:01 Take for example, just on the global side, we offer an incredibly compelling set of solutions to any sovereign nation that might want everything from advanced PNT to operate in GPS-denied environments, increasingly important in today’s geopolitical landscape, to the computing power that will change their economy for the better in the future. And so sovereigns are interested, of course, in all forms of technology across quantum, but also in every industry you have enterprises that are coming to us asking for joint solutions.
de Masi 2:19:59 He’s been one of the leading voices behind Italy’s digital and technological transformation under Giorgia Meloni’s leadership, the longest-serving government I think Italy’s had since the war. Under his leadership, the Department of Digital Transformation has played a central role in advancing Italy’s national quantum strategy and supporting Italy’s ambition to become a leading hub in Europe for quantum innovation.
Butti 2:21:37 That is why Italy wants an open, competitive, and technology-neutral ecosystem in line with the European Union. … Niccolò and Marco, I look forward to seeing you next month in Cernobbio, on Lake Como, at the Como Lake Digital Innovation Forum, where we signed an important MOU last year to develop quantum in Italy and Europe.
de Masi 2:41:28 So look, just on that theme, and we got time for our last question here: sovereignty, trust, zero trust, obviously domestic supply chains, executive orders.
Muller 2:41:49 And I think that’s the oldest technology that IonQ has, and I think it is uniquely capable of delivering high-trust solutions to sovereign nations and to companies and to ultimately individuals who need to be able to use that capability.
de Masi 2:45:40 You’ve seen us add a quantum foundry and be very deliberate about how we expand integrated photonics so we can provide more value to our nation’s quantum ecosystem, to our allies’ quantum ecosystem, so that they can go faster. … We look forward to growing our merchant supply business with only more participants amongst the US, the Five Eyes, and the allied world.
XIII. Life sciences, healthcare and pharmaceuticals
Life sciences: chemistry, proteins, genomics and the clinical case.
de Masi 4:40 We are unlocking all the applications that we said we would last year, and you’ve seen these announcements, whether it’s computational engineering, whether it’s logistics, whether or not it’s image change detection, whether it’s in the pharmaceutical space. … We’ve done it in a responsible way, in partnership with our nation’s government, and we’ve done it because we want to show people that the blocking and tackling, belt and braces approach we’ve taken for thirty years now since our company was founded continues to deliver results that are real, on schedule, and with huge implications for sectors like chemistry, materials science, and of course the life sciences.
Sakac 1:42:36 We focus here on life sciences and pharma, with examples in every vertical. … Protein folding on Tempo from 14 to 16 amino acids.
de Masi 2:00:02 He is not only a very successful serial entrepreneur in the aeronautics space, but also in the AI space and the pharmaceutical biotech sector.
Rabinowitz 2:03:45 Imagine you’ve got a hundred amino acids, and amino acids one and two can rotate relative to one another, and whatever they decide will be relevant to all of the energy configurations of the other amino acids, including one hundred. … Huge applications in healthcare: protein binding, neoantigen prediction for personal cancer vaccines, predicting how patients will respond to certain therapies, prognostic applications.
Rabinowitz 2:12:54 We can catch the recurrence of cancers years or months before you see clinical symptoms. … With that capability we have a huge amount of data — curated clinical data with AI models, upfront tumor sequence and RNA sequence most of the time, outcomes — and we can train models, for example on neoantigen prediction for personal cancer vaccines.
Cardillo 2:33:00 But what compels me about this team is that it comes together in a way that reflects that outcome, that mission satisfaction, that drug discovery, that application of science in service of humanity and security that brought me here to IonQ.
XIV. Energy and utilities
Energy, utilities, grid and power consumption.
Shapiro 1:25:01 Or in oil and gas, we’re talking about quantum chemistry solutions and also using PNT for finding new oil wells, and at the same time working on quantum security as well for critical infrastructure that oil and gas has.
Sakac 1:42:36 \[Chad go-to-market remarks continue through applications, AstraZeneca, protein folding, IEEE Quantum Week, cytochrome P450, customer engagement — full text restored below.\] All right, we’re getting close to the next phase and the end of this, so I’m going to change up the energy here in the room a little bit. … Example: quantum algorithms improving LLM behavior, 24 percent better accuracy, lower time to solution, better energy efficiency.
Long 2:02:32 So we’re making our systems available, and we are approaching different business aspects with those in the community and nationally, and really focusing on the energy grid, energy-grid optimization and energy security, and really utilizing pretty much the full stack of IonQ services. As Chad mentioned, we have eight fellows via this grant, and we leverage the IonQ training platform to train our fellows, and we are writing our own algorithms and running our own programs to service the energy needs of the industry.
Long 2:08:09 We are the local power utility and generally maybe not thought about with quantum, but to be able to leverage our full fiber network — ten years ago we partnered with Oak Ridge National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, as well as Qubitekk, now in the IonQ family, and worked on and successfully tested QKD across a 21-kilometer span on our fiber network.
XV. Enterprise software, financial services and AI convergence
Enterprise software, financial services, and where quantum meets AI.
de Masi 4:40 And it’s coming sooner than people think, and it’s coming inside the planning horizon of a CISO, whether or not you are in a government position, federal position, or an enterprise one. … It’s a system that is upgradable, a system that’s accessible through the cloud and through sovereign systems, and best of all, it’s a system that’s all been accelerated and all gone onto the SkyWater chips that we now fully integrate with, and our friend Tom Sonderman runs.
Ballance 18:36 We’ve learnt about operational excellence and the good pain it’s taken to build out these quantum computers, build out the supply chain, manufacturing and operational teams required to get quantum computers online on the cloud. … To get out to true scale, to millions of qubits deployed around millions of data centers, we need to build out a core platform that allows us to hit this scale, that allows us to tackle applications that can’t be tackled any other way, and where each generation of the system teaches us about the next.
Shapiro 36:47 We previously announced that we were the first company in an enterprise setting to interconnect two different quantum computers together, two IonQ trapped-ion systems with our partners at Air Force Research Lab, or AFRL. … Today you’re seeing what is the first example to our knowledge of a hybrid quantum- classical workflow with SAR data, where we’re taking IonQ’s quantum computer, we’re putting it in the loop, and we’re processing data from our SAR platform.
Singh 47:01 I’m seeing those happen in hybrid deployments, an AI factory with a GPU next to it. … Technology innovation at the frontier of technology isn’t easy, but if you’re asking yourself what comes after AI, quantum comes after AI.
Sonderman 1:17:18 So again, these don’t require the same scale as like a smartphone or even AI data centers.
Sonderman 1:21:05 So think of Fab 25 as part of our foundry ecosystem, and that gives us significant purchasing power, supply-chain optimization.
Shapiro 1:25:01 And so sovereigns are interested, of course, in all forms of technology across quantum, but also in every industry you have enterprises that are coming to us asking for joint solutions. So financial companies, for example, any financial services firm — we’re in the heart, a financial heart here in New York — we are having conversations about financial applications of quantum computing, and then we’re hopping over to the security team to talk to the CISO about quantum security.
Bhaskar 1:31:00 We took our quantum computing system, our trapped ions, and we connected it to this quantum memory in order to really use a new architecture, a heterogeneous architecture, a device optimized for computing and a device optimized for networking working together to create a system that’s better than the sum of its individual parts. … He pioneered the development of putting laser systems on a chip, and without that, we really wouldn’t have the massive scale- out of today’s AI data centers, the optical interconnects that are connecting GPUs and computing devices.
Sakac 1:42:36 Customers like choice of language — we support all seven major open-source IDEs/stacks — and choice of where: cloud, on-prem, sovereign. … Customers who bought Aria and Forte bought Tempo and want Superion cloud access.
de Masi 2:00:02 John Lokada is the Futures Director of ServiceNow, my friend at the end. … He is not only a very successful serial entrepreneur in the aeronautics space, but also in the AI space and the pharmaceutical biotech sector.
Lokada 2:01:46 We are innately becoming more focused on the role of security into the future of workflows, which dovetails into the second opportunity that I believe is worth calling out, which is optimization. … So for us, we’re looking at quantum plus AI, and it’s been wonderful to be on the journey of exploration with the team at IonQ.
Long 2:02:32 We have a full fiber network in the Chattanooga area, and we are picking around the quarter when our IonQ Forte Enterprise system will be fully commissioned. … So we’re making our systems available, and we are approaching different business aspects with those in the community and nationally, and really focusing on the energy grid, energy-grid optimization and energy security, and really utilizing pretty much the full stack of IonQ services.
Rabinowitz 2:03:45 There are problems in AI where we still don’t really understand whether we are limited by the data that’s available or we’re limited by the architectures and finding the global minimum of those architectures. … The application of AI to tease out the signals in these genetic datasets — DNA and very noisy gene-expression data, very noisy clinical data — is a problem AI has a huge role in, and we believe quantum AI will play a role in the future as well.
de Masi 2:07:02 So I’d love to understand how you’ve each thought — and John, same thing, you led the quantum initiative at ServiceNow across the board for quite some time — how are you thinking about extending your leadership positions in your sectors?
Long 2:08:09 We’re continuing to invest, pull investors into Chattanooga, make our computer available physically in our quantum center or via the cloud.
Lokada 2:10:25 You need to know where the complexities become far greater, and we need to start thinking outside the box to see what we can do to deliver the future of workflows, hybrid workflows, quantum plus AI. … We need to understand how we can lead with security and how we can drive opportunities that absolutely make sense for modern-day GPUs, but when you need the QPUs there, you need the plumbing that can integrate between today and tomorrow.
XVI. Industrials, logistics, oil and gas
Industrials, logistics, supply chain and materials.
de Masi 4:40 We are unlocking all the applications that we said we would last year, and you’ve seen these announcements, whether it’s computational engineering, whether it’s logistics, whether or not it’s image change detection, whether it’s in the pharmaceutical space. … We’ve done it in a responsible way, in partnership with our nation’s government, and we’ve done it because we want to show people that the blocking and tackling, belt and braces approach we’ve taken for thirty years now since our company was founded continues to deliver results that are real, on schedule, and with huge implications for sectors like chemistry, materials science, and of course the life sciences.
Ballance 1:10:04 At the time, a major industrial foundry and SkyWater. The major industrial foundry was pushing out the delivery timelines for some hardware by a couple of months, six months out, since they had challenges with supply chain getting particular chemicals to put in particular machines that deposited particular layers.
Shapiro 1:25:01 Or in oil and gas, we’re talking about quantum chemistry solutions and also using PNT for finding new oil wells, and at the same time working on quantum security as well for critical infrastructure that oil and gas has.
Martinis 1:37:17 So I very much look forward to working with the SkyWater team to not just simply build a better and bigger quantum computer, but lay the industrial foundation for a new era of computing.
Butti 2:21:37 It encompasses quantum communication and security, sensing, research, skills, and the development of a strong industrial ecosystem. … It can become a catalyst for innovation across manufacturing, aerospace and defense, life sciences, energy, cybersecurity, telecommunication, finance, and advanced materials.
de Masi 2:41:28 So look, just on that theme, and we got time for our last question here: sovereignty, trust, zero trust, obviously domestic supply chains, executive orders.
XVII. Go-to-market, customers and commercial motion
Customers, the go-to-market motion, and how systems are sold and deployed.
Singh 0:00 You have customers that will be joining on the right hand side, as you see, a number of panels to tell you what they’re focused on, how they’re using either the security solution from us or the computing solution from us or imaging from space using AI. … It shows you the engagement of the company, it shows the engagement of the board, and the importance that we place on making sure that every one of our constituencies — customers, investors, partners, board — are all involved.
de Masi 4:40 And this is a map that we are delivering to, servicing customers on, and of course doing better every generation to deliver customer satisfaction. … So we’re focused on building our ecosystem, expanding our ecosystem, and delivering these machines at an access point, price point, power consumption point, manufacturable space consumption point that hopefully every company, every government in the world can invest in, because of the fact that we do what we say we’re going to do at IonQ, and we tell you the next generation of systems will roll out, and we’ll go from two, fifty-six to ten K to twenty K, two hundred K.
Ballance 18:36 We need to make our platform as manufacturable and as deployable as possible to get out to the true scale we want, both the number of systems deployed and the number of qubits in those systems. … I’m proud to say that we expect to have the first systems starting deployments on customer sites in early 2027.
Sonderman 31:11 And one thing that has happened recently with the partnership between SkyWater and IonQ is we’ve moved out of the physics demonstration realm to now manufacturing at scale in a highly developed operation that will allow us to not only deliver the speed required to get the cycles of learning necessary to drive the roadmap that Chris just showed, but also the scale. … Quantum is sovereign infrastructure, and it’s absolutely critical that SkyWater, IonQ and the quantum foundry model that we created protects the IP for our customers, and more importantly, protects our national security for things tied to the defense of our country.
Shapiro 36:47 This makes IonQ not just the most robust platform, but also the most deployed platform when it comes to commercializing quantum security and providing a solution to the looming threat of Q-Day and HNDL. … Our US government customers are validating our technologies, whether they be our quantum computing platform with DARPA QBI, our quantum sensors, most recently the fifty-eight million dollar agreement for the It’s About Time program, but also our networks and our space technology, recent contract with NRO as well on the space side.
Singh 47:01 Yes, we acquired some companies, they brought some revenue, but as we’ve said every earnings call, we keep investing in the computing as well and make sure that stays our fastest growing engine, and we’re thrilled that it’s still driving a lot of our growth, and we’re thrilled that we have actually a portfolio of things that we can sell to a customer.
Ballance 1:08:42 The customers that like photonic interconnects are typically not the customers who just want one big computer. … It’s a tremendously valuable thing to sell alongside our core quantum compute products.
Mobley 1:13:05 So from those other eight, what have the conversations been like with respect to their comfort in dealing with you as a foundry partner to making sure that you won’t essentially handicap their roadmap.
Sonderman 1:13:58 So the way we treat any customer is we compartmentalize the information, we don’t cross-contaminate, and all of our customers and the audience here should be a hundred percent confident that their roadmap won’t be impeded by the needs of IonQ. The ability for us to move fast with IonQ, who is our largest quantum company, allows those capabilities to be populated out across our other quantum customers.
Sonderman 1:17:18 The ability to move with faster iterations just closes the gap between ideation and commercialization, and it’s all about time to market.
Singh 1:18:35 And we intend to keep investing, obviously, in the quantum foundry.
Bolton 1:19:09 Does that stay sort of a quasi-independent CMOS high-volume fab for non-quantum customers, or do you see a time where you might start to run some of the quantum wafers at Fab 25.
Ballance 1:20:02 It’s about building out and validating a production scale for these devices, and that’s the work that’s going on right now as we lead up to production and the start of deployments of the first systems in early ’27.
Sonderman 1:21:05 The complement of having a secure manufacturing facility and advanced packaging facility is important because that allows us to focus on the innovation side and also have a place where customers can migrate out of the Minnesota fab into, you know, say, a Texas fab.
Ellis 1:22:45 Thanks so much to all of you for all of the insights today.
Shapiro 1:25:01 And you’re right, customers are approaching us and asking not just for one part of the platform, but for integrated solutions, and that is virtually global, in every country around the globe, and virtually in every area, every industry. We’re seeing customers come to us asking about integrated technologies and solutions.
Rakesh 1:27:01 You had made an acquisition of Nexus Photonics, just wondering how that fits into the IonQ and SkyWater roadmap.
Singh 1:28:56 So on pricing, obviously I’m not going to go into a lot of detail in terms of pricing, but you can think about it as a candy jar of opportunity for us, right? … And we forward-deploy engineers, forward-deploy app developers to go from their cost side of their equation to the revenue side of their equation.
Martinis 1:37:17 We’re very excited that IonQ acquired SkyWater and are helping with extra focus to work on quantum computing, and we think that that’s a very good partnership and acquisition, and it helps SkyWater be able to focus build new capabilities in their fabrication to properly scale up quantum computers and build them properly.
Ho 1:40:01 I’m very proud to work with SkyWater to create, to be their first customer for the SC250 process.
Sakac 1:42:36 \[Chad go-to-market remarks continue through applications, AstraZeneca, protein folding, IEEE Quantum Week, cytochrome P450, customer engagement — full text restored below.\] All right, we’re getting close to the next phase and the end of this, so I’m going to change up the energy here in the room a little bit. … About 70 people worldwide on forward-deployed engineering, customer solutions, and apps R&D, almost entirely PhDs.
de Masi 2:00:02 EPB is one of our largest, closest, and most historic partners.
Long 2:02:32 So we have the first nationally available quantum network, as well as the first commercially available quantum computer.
Long 2:08:09 We are the local power utility and generally maybe not thought about with quantum, but to be able to leverage our full fiber network — ten years ago we partnered with Oak Ridge National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, as well as Qubitekk, now in the IonQ family, and worked on and successfully tested QKD across a 21-kilometer span on our fiber network. … We have partnerships with UT Chattanooga and other entities looking to come and continue to build out the ecosystem around quantum.
Lokada 2:19:00 I would just say that operational resiliency is a term not used a lot in this discussion, and I think that we need — this is a partner ecosystem.
de Masi 2:19:59 Okay, so we’re going to move on, and I’m going to introduce our guest keynote speaker for today.
de Masi 2:27:33 Marco Pistoia runs IonQ Italia, and over the last few weeks and months we’ve struck up a fantastic partnership with a business called Lutech that is run by our friend Giuseppe here. And we’re announcing today — this will go out in the news I think tomorrow morning before market open — that there is now a partnership between IonQ Italia and Lutech for the nation’s go-to-market of all of IonQ’s quantum platforms.
Cardillo 2:33:00 I had the privilege in that time period to spend four years I was in the Oval Office, providing that intelligence service to important customers at critical moments. … But what really excites me about the IonQ response to that strategic challenge are the applications and the customers and the missions that you heard about, because one thing I learned as an intelligence professional: in many ways what we do doesn’t matter unless it affects a better decision on those we serve.
Muller 2:35:04 I’ve spent a lot of my career doing technical development with the government as some sort of customer, either as a funding agency or ultimately when I was at IARPA as a destination, as a transition partner for what we were developing.
Muller 2:41:49 That means we can build low-cost solutions that consume low power, that can be scaled very rapidly, and what that gives you is not just some anonymous quantum service that you log in to some anonymous host, but that gives you a solution that can be deployed locally or deployed remotely, that is your own solution to a lot of these technical problems.
Cardillo 2:43:39 IonQ is a responsible, credible partner, obviously to our customers, but also to the governments that we work with. … Rick led many of them with the senior-most levels of our government because one, we didn’t want to surprise our partners in government.
de Masi 2:45:40 And you’ve heard clearly from Thomas and myself since we announced the SkyWater merger that our commitment to supporting existing SkyWater customers as well as new ones when it comes to everything from the best members of the team, as well as of course unparalleled IP protections, is absolute.
XVIII. Merchant supply and the industry-enablement business
Merchant supply: serving the rest of the industry out of the same fab.
Sonderman 31:11 We came up with this concept called a technology foundry and a business model called technology as a service that allows us to create the bridge over what’s known as the valley of death, where lots of great technologies start out in the lab, but they just never make it to the fab. … We have nine, as of the announcement today with Qolab, nine different quantum customers that are all working in SkyWater.
Mobley 1:13:05 So, you know, I think you mentioned in your presentation you have nine quantum compute companies.
Sonderman 1:13:58 So it’s very much the rising tide lifts all boats.
Sonderman 1:17:18 And I keep going back to, that’s why we created the technology-as-a-service model to innovate at scale and to create a model where companies could innovate.
Singh 1:18:35 They’re part of the industry and the ecosystem that’s going to exist in the future.
Martinis 1:37:17 I’m the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Qolab. … And I think that transition is going to happen if scientists like myself, people in Qolab start collaborating with people in the manufacturing space, especially those who are doing semiconductor kind of fabrication.
Bhaskar 1:39:29 And really, to unpack this further, I’m thrilled to invite CEO of Qolab, Alan Ho, to the stage.
Ho 1:40:01 And to give you a little bit of understanding about that, Qolab does all its design, packaging, and cryogenic testing in Madison, Wisconsin, also in the Midwest.
de Masi 2:45:40 You’ve seen us grow our merchant supply business decisively this year. … We look forward to growing our merchant supply business with only more participants amongst the US, the Five Eyes, and the allied world.
XIX. Talent, organization and leadership
Team, leadership, hiring and the board.
Singh 0:00 I moved from the board into the company a year ago, actually this month, and the first analyst day was one week after I joined. … It shows you the engagement of the company, it shows the engagement of the board, and the importance that we place on making sure that every one of our constituencies — customers, investors, partners, board — are all involved.
de Masi 4:40 Whether or not you’re in our IR function or our comms function or events team or product marketing team, this is slated to be easily our most exciting corporate event to date. … Now, this page, I have to be honest, it’s my favorite one, and I am hugely proud of the fact that over the last two years, we have worked as a team to scale our company and deliver a quantum platform that has a unique depth, breadth, and scale advantage not seen anywhere else in the industry.
Shapiro 36:47 At the same time, we’re seeing another trend, which is that governments are pulling in their migration requirements for companies and organizations and leaders worldwide to be much sooner than originally expected. … Today, for the first time, I’m able to share that we are using our quantum computers with our remote sensing part of the organization as well.
Singh 47:01 You know, when I joined Niccolò in this mission to help make this platform company into the pace setter that he’s made it — I take no credit for that — and also how much more we can accomplish here together as a team, he’s pulled together an amazing team. … So Niccolò and I, and the leadership team, and the board will make sure that we have the ability to fund our innovation for many years to come.
Ballance 1:10:04 So to me, a lot of this is the culture, how the business works. … We spoke to the SkyWater team on a Tuesday, and they said, "Our supplier is quoting us a month.
Sonderman 1:17:18 So the capabilities we have between our Minnesota and Florida operations have more than enough capacity to deliver what we believe is required from Chris and his team on the compute side, as well as Jordan and his team on the broader quantum platform side.
Martinis 1:37:17 I’m the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Qolab. … So I very much look forward to working with the SkyWater team to not just simply build a better and bigger quantum computer, but lay the industrial foundation for a new era of computing.
Bhaskar 1:42:03 And just to conclude and move on to the next section, I hope you can see how, whether it’s through the scale- out solutions or the scale-up semiconductor ecosystem, all of the roads to scaling quantum are running through the team in this room.
Sakac 1:42:36 I’m talking about the organization, the people, the process — how do you take these things to scale? … We more than doubled the customer-engagement team in the first half.
de Masi 2:00:02 We’ve got some wonderful panelists who are making their way up the stage here.
Lokada 2:01:46 So for us, we’re looking at quantum plus AI, and it’s been wonderful to be on the journey of exploration with the team at IonQ.
de Masi 2:07:02 So I’d love to understand how you’ve each thought — and John, same thing, you led the quantum initiative at ServiceNow across the board for quite some time — how are you thinking about extending your leadership positions in your sectors?
Long 2:19:26 I’ll just add that I believe that the future will need an unbelievable amount of teamwork and connectivity to work together to solve these problems and to have these connections and cooperation across various organizations. The government having the support and coordinating those efforts will absolutely pull forward the technology and continue to push the US to a leadership position in quantum.
de Masi 2:19:59 He’s been one of the leading voices behind Italy’s digital and technological transformation under Giorgia Meloni’s leadership, the longest-serving government I think Italy’s had since the war. Under his leadership, the Department of Digital Transformation has played a central role in advancing Italy’s national quantum strategy and supporting Italy’s ambition to become a leading hub in Europe for quantum innovation.
Butti 2:21:37 Good afternoon, Niccolò, members of the IonQ leadership team, distinguished guests and colleagues. … We welcome companies such as IonQ Italia, led by Marco Pistoia, bringing global quantum expertise to Italy and investing in talent, research and universities.
de Masi 2:27:33 He is the founder of the Space Force under the first Trump administration, and the only four-star general to be a four-star in two services since the Air Force was founded in 1947. … Robert Cardillo, also a board member and now board observer at IonQ, was the former director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and he has been a vital supporter of our insights in that community.
Raymond 2:30:47 It’s a real privilege to be part of the IonQ team and to be here this afternoon.
Cardillo 2:33:00 But what compels me about this team is that it comes together in a way that reflects that outcome, that mission satisfaction, that drug discovery, that application of science in service of humanity and security that brought me here to IonQ.
Muller 2:35:04 And I think one of the things that IonQ builds is the team. … But the point is that we’ve built a team that can take the best science and combine it with people that understand the mission well, and create really important solutions that are targeted at the hardest problems.
de Masi 2:37:13 Rick’s the only one of the four of us that has a PhD in ion trapping, but Robert and Jay have run much larger organizations, and I’ve appreciated their counsel and mentoring on how to do a good job of that as we continue scaling. I’d love, General, if you’d share some team-building examples if you have a moment as pertains to where you think quantum is.
Raymond 2:37:39 And it was a team that operated, in my opinion, with the same integrity that I saw when I was in the Space Force or in military service. … And if you look at what we did in establishing Space Force, we took the vast majority — were like me, they came out of the Air Force — but we also brought together people from the Army and the Navy and the Marines, and we brought people from off the street and out of colleges and out of the academies, and we had to integrate these people all together into one high-functioning team that our nation required.
Cardillo 2:39:32 And so to me, what’s most exciting here about what the team’s doing is essentially providing what I call a coherence-from-chaos service. … And to finish on where your question was going: if you think over the past twelve months since we were here last year, the teammates that we’ve invited, many of which you’ve seen today, have not just complemented, but they’ve truly scaled, and the executive order that Jay mentioned actually demands that piece, a scaled ecosystem, and I couldn’t be prouder to be part of a team that’s responding to that call.
Cardillo 2:43:39 If I could just finish with a quick comment about the paper that was released today about the advances that our scientific team has developed along the lines of Shor’s algorithm. … And I want to credit the whole IonQ team for the conversations that ensued.
de Masi 2:45:40 It has been an overwhelming privilege to watch our team grow, watch our team perform, and watch our company not just scale, but hit technical milestones as we promised, and as importantly, I would argue even more importantly, hit our commercial milestones, time and time again.
XX. Academic, workforce and regional ecosystem
Universities, workforce, publications and the regional ecosystem.
de Masi 4:40 We have not only distinguished university professors, and we’ll hear from some of them later on. … I don’t know about you guys, but for most of my time in the quantum computing space, I remember a lecture of mine when I was in university, and I read Chris Monroe’s paper in ’95, ’94, the first quantum logic gate.
Singh 1:12:19 And Chris and I, when we did the Oxford acquisition, we’ll remember this, but there are other foundries that were trying to be quantum foundries also, and we talked to one of them — I won’t name them — and they couldn’t move fast enough.
Ho 1:40:01 People don’t really talk about the Silicon Heartland too much.
Sakac 1:42:36 2025 Google/Caltech paper is at a scale more than a Superion 20K could do; we could do it with a 100K, or with five 20K systems in parallel, pulling a workload forward two years — hundreds of millions of NPV. … EPB started in networking, expanded to computing; system being commissioned; expanding into quantum memories in Chattanooga.
Long 2:02:32 We have a full fiber network in the Chattanooga area, and we are picking around the quarter when our IonQ Forte Enterprise system will be fully commissioned. … As Chad mentioned, we have eight fellows via this grant, and we leverage the IonQ training platform to train our fellows, and we are writing our own algorithms and running our own programs to service the energy needs of the industry.
Long 2:08:09 With our quantum network and thinking of what we’re trying to build in Chattanooga, adding the quantum computer, we really want to have an ecosystem that builds within Chattanooga, centered around quantum, our network and our computer. … We have a very supportive city and county as well as a state government that wants to invest behind quantum to make Chattanooga and Tennessee a leader.
Rabinowitz 2:12:54 Training a whole LLM on a quantum architecture is still on the come, but if you do the fine- tuning with a quantum architecture, you take the embedding from the deep-learning architecture. There was a beautiful paper that came out of IonQ in May looking at fine-tuning a large language model to look at text and see whether reviews were positive or negative.
Butti 2:21:37 We welcome companies such as IonQ Italia, led by Marco Pistoia, bringing global quantum expertise to Italy and investing in talent, research and universities. … It connects companies, universities, and research institutions and provides researchers with access to advanced quantum compute systems.
de Masi 2:37:13 Rick’s the only one of the four of us that has a PhD in ion trapping, but Robert and Jay have run much larger organizations, and I’ve appreciated their counsel and mentoring on how to do a good job of that as we continue scaling.
Muller 2:41:49 I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Chris Monroe, Professor Monroe, for many years.
Cardillo 2:43:39 If I could just finish with a quick comment about the paper that was released today about the advances that our scientific team has developed along the lines of Shor’s algorithm.
Raymond 2:44:40 I went to Clemson University, otherwise known as the Harvard of the South, I guess.
XXI. Competitive positioning claims
Competitive claims, and who the company measures itself against.
Promotional video 3:08 The recent US executive orders made one thing clear: the world needs a competitive quantum ecosystem.
de Masi 4:40 It took us seven months to get that deal closed, and it is hugely historic, and I’m excited about the fact that we are not only the largest quantum company in history, but we’re the first one that is vertically integrated. … We think this is going to be a race that accelerates and one that demands ever more investment to stay ahead of, because the combination of what quantum computers in the wrong hands and classical LLMs in the wrong hands can do is only going to make this trickier.
Shapiro 36:47 In the case of quantum security, we understand the threats better than our competitors because we also have quantum computing as part of our business. … We previously announced that we were the first company in an enterprise setting to interconnect two different quantum computers together, two IonQ trapped-ion systems with our partners at Air Force Research Lab, or AFRL.
Singh 47:01 You know, when I joined Niccolò in this mission to help make this platform company into the pace setter that he’s made it — I take no credit for that — and also how much more we can accomplish here together as a team, he’s pulled together an amazing team. … You have been the pace setter, and the management team that you have, and you saw here, are very focused on that.
Singh 1:12:19 The other is no one else can really match it right now.
Mobley 1:13:05 And how much of a time lead do you think you have vis- à-vis IBM and others or GlobalFoundries QTS before they hit their milestones and become a real alternative to SkyWater?
Sonderman 1:13:58 The ability for us to move fast with IonQ, who is our largest quantum company, allows those capabilities to be populated out across our other quantum customers. … Anduril is out there, you know, they bought HRL, but again, IBM sold their microelectronics business to GlobalFoundries back in 2015.
Singh 1:18:35 Again, I don’t think of the others as competitors that are in that foundry.
Sakac 1:42:36 2025 Google/Caltech paper is at a scale more than a Superion 20K could do; we could do it with a 100K, or with five 20K systems in parallel, pulling a workload forward two years — hundreds of millions of NPV. … Hired an oil-and-gas specialist who in month one met two of the largest U.S.
de Masi 2:00:02 EPB is one of our largest, closest, and most historic partners.
de Masi 2:07:02 So each of you has been a visionary and leader in this sector. … Rabinowitz almost grabbed my lapel at an event we were both at and said, I want to be five years ahead of all my competitors in all of these areas you’ve mentioned.
Rabinowitz 2:12:54 This was the year before Google Brain started to work intensively on training multi-layer nonlinear neural perceptrons with memory. … I am trying to be ahead of these possibilities.
Cardillo 2:33:00 What got me to this company was it was the only company that I saw bringing together all of the pieces that you’ve seen today.
XXII. Forward-looking statements and dated commitments
Forward-looking statements and anything said with a date attached.
Singh 0:00 On the left hand side, you’ll hear from a number of the leaders of the company about how we’re doing and how we’re executing, what our plans are, what our priorities are, and how we plan to keep on innovating in each of these areas, whether it’s in computing, in the security area, and a number of things, frankly, that three years ago people thought were like three decades away. … If you have questions, of course, we’ll have — please make sure that the funds from Washington to Wall Street is
de Masi 4:40 What makes IonQ different is that we’ve been running for over five years in the cloud, we’ve been shipping systems for over five years, and our machines turned on in 2017. … Next two or three years at IonQ, we talk about the next five years, seven years, and we see a huge opportunity for not just our machines to become more powerful in their own right, but an opportunity for us to deliver data-center-scale quantum computers.
Singh 47:01 We got approval on July 31st, a couple days before earnings, and so we were thrilled, and it happened in the timeline we said it would happen. … So for the five months that we will have owned them this year, they’ll have delivered two hundred and forty million dollars of revenue to us, of which, by the way, seventy million is from us, right?
Ballance 1:08:42 This is, you know, looking on a five-year view.
Ballance 1:10:04 The major industrial foundry was pushing out the delivery timelines for some hardware by a couple of months, six months out, since they had challenges with supply chain getting particular chemicals to put in particular machines that deposited particular layers. … Our other partner at the time was still giving us a two-month slip on a six-month timeline.
Sonderman 1:13:58 Anduril is out there, you know, they bought HRL, but again, IBM sold their microelectronics business to GlobalFoundries back in 2015.
Sonderman 1:17:18 Eventually, products will go into volume manufacturing, and we will continue to innovate in parallel.
Ballance 1:20:02 It’s about building out and validating a production scale for these devices, and that’s the work that’s going on right now as we lead up to production and the start of deployments of the first systems in early ’27.
Sonderman 1:21:05 In many cases, we synergize between the different sites, and what I showed is our CMOS semiconductor foundry business, which we will continue to move forward.
Ellis 1:22:45 So Chris, as we look out to the end of the decade at your roadmap, and we see the scale-up to billions of qubits, tiling gets really important.
Singh 1:28:56 We are lowering our own cost, starting with the lowest cost to begin with, and over the next few years, we need to make strategic decisions about how much of that margin we want to keep and share with our customers, right? … So as we map out our next five years and think about investing for the next five years, absolutely, we’re laser focused on ensuring that we deliver total cost of ownership advantage for the customer and then margin expansion for us.
de Masi 1:30:39 So Inder will be around during the bell-ringing ceremony, and we’ll be back for reception right afterwards, and I’ll be there also.
Martinis 1:37:17 I was a co-developer of qubit technology in the 1980s, and I’ve been excited to see the transition from a fundamental physics experiment to something that we want to make useful in the next few years.
de Masi 2:00:02 ServiceNow, you’re thinking about what the next year or two brings.
de Masi 2:07:02 Rabinowitz almost grabbed my lapel at an event we were both at and said, I want to be five years ahead of all my competitors in all of these areas you’ve mentioned.
Long 2:08:09 And now with IonQ forming an office, landing an office in Chattanooga, an R&D facility, Vanderbilt is coming to Chattanooga over the next three to five years.
Raymond 2:30:47 As Niccolò said, I served about thirty-five and a half years in the Air Force and then transitioned over to the Space Force in 2019. As I reflect on the environment in 2019 as it relates to space, it was becoming — our nation was becoming much more reliant on space.
de Masi 2:45:40 The board of directors has been hugely supportive of our aggressive agenda, both technically and commercially, and you should expect to see only more of that in the coming twelve months. … I look forward to seeing all of you at World Quantum Day, when we will be back here on April 14th, 2027.
XXIII. Analyst questions from the floor
The seven questions from the floor, in the questioner’s own words.
McPeak 1:08:17 At what number of physical qubits does photonic quantum interconnect become important, in your roadmap?
Choksi 1:09:29 Probably for Thomas, maybe for Chris, but the reduction in cycle time from eight months to two months is absolutely astounding. I would love to get more insight on how you guys have achieved that, and I’m thinking one element may be which lithography node IonQ is working SkyWater with, and you know what range of lithography nodes does SkyWater work with as
Mobley 1:13:05 And how much of a time lead do you think you have vis- à-vis IBM and others or GlobalFoundries QTS before they hit their milestones and become a real alternative to SkyWater?
Analyst 1:16:18 And also, the other thing, so as we have the applications in shorter cycles, I believe we need to have capabilities of both little manufacturing capabilities. So do you have any plan or kind of the capabilities perspective.
Bolton 1:19:09 I guess can you talk about when will you have enough data to talk about gate fidelity, median gate fidelity across the two hundred and fifty-six qubits in that QPU? … And then for Tom, just can you discuss plans for Fab 25?
Ellis 1:22:45 Is it more as a result of executive orders that hit in the US?
Rakesh 1:27:01 And also, for Inder, I guess, how do you look at the 256-qubit systems? … And if you can give us some idea on how to look at fiscal 27, I guess, between the core IonQ and the SkyWater, right?
Appendix B — Names, Products and Programs
A back-of-book index of the companies, products, programs, institutions, places and people named on stage, alphabetically, with the turns in which each appears. Names are given in their corrected form: where the audio-derived record and IonQ’s own press releases of September 8, 2026 disagreed, the releases govern.
An entry here means the name was spoken in that turn. It does not mean the turn is principally about it — for the latter, use the subject index in Appendix A.
AFRL / Air Force Research Lab Shapiro 36:47 · Singh 47:01
Anduril Industries Sonderman 1:13:58
Aria Singh 47:01 · Sakac 1:42:36
Ballance, Chris de Masi 4:40 · Singh 47:01 · Cardillo 2:33:00
Bowers, John Bhaskar 1:31:00 · Bhaskar 1:39:29
Chattanooga / EPB Sakac 1:42:36 · de Masi 2:00:02 · Long 2:02:32 · de Masi 2:07:02 · Long 2:08:09
CMOS Ballance 18:36 · Bolton 1:19:09 · Sonderman 1:21:05
Crosstalk Bolton 1:19:09
DARPA de Masi 4:40 · Shapiro 36:47 · Bhaskar 1:31:00
Executive orders (US) Promotional video 3:08 · Shapiro 36:47 · Ellis 1:22:45 · Cardillo 2:39:32 · de Masi 2:41:28
Fab 25 (Texas) Bolton 1:19:09 · Sonderman 1:21:05 · Singh 1:22:07
Florida operations Sonderman 31:11 · Sonderman 1:17:18 · Sonderman 1:21:05 · Singh 1:22:07
Forte / Forte Enterprise Sakac 1:42:36 · Long 2:02:32
GlobalFoundries Mobley 1:13:05 · Sonderman 1:13:58
GPS-denied environments Singh 47:01 · Shapiro 1:25:01
HRL Sonderman 1:13:58
IBM Mobley 1:13:05 · Sonderman 1:13:58
IonQ Italia Butti 2:21:37 · de Masi 2:27:33
IARPA de Masi 2:27:33 · Muller 2:35:04
Italy de Masi 2:19:59 · Butti 2:21:37
JPMorgan / Pistoia, Marco Butti 2:21:37 · de Masi 2:27:33
Korea Ballance 1:10:04
Lightsynq de Masi 4:40 · Bhaskar 1:31:00
Lithography node (90 nm) Choksi 1:09:29 · Sonderman 1:11:46
Martinis, John Bhaskar 1:31:00 · Martinis 1:37:17 · Bhaskar 1:39:29
Minnesota fab Sonderman 31:11 · Sonderman 1:17:18 · Sonderman 1:21:05 · Singh 1:22:07
Monroe, Chris de Masi 4:40 · Muller 2:41:49 · de Masi 2:45:40
Moore's Law Sonderman 31:11 · Singh 47:01
Natera de Masi 2:00:02 · Rabinowitz 2:12:54
Nexus Photonics Rakesh 1:27:01 · de Masi 1:27:29 · Bhaskar 1:27:36 · Bhaskar 1:31:00
NIST Shapiro 36:47
Nobel Prize Bhaskar 1:31:00 · Ho 1:40:01
NYSE / bell ringing Singh 0:00 · de Masi 4:40 · Singh 47:01 · de Masi 1:30:39 · de Masi 2:19:59 · Butti 2:21:37 · de Masi 2:45:40
Oxford Ionics / Oxford acquisition Singh 47:01 · Singh 1:12:19
PNT Shapiro 36:47 · Shapiro 1:25:01
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) de Masi 4:40 · Shapiro 36:47 · Lokada 2:10:25
QCaaS Singh 47:01 · Singh 1:28:56
Qolab Sonderman 31:11 · Bhaskar 1:31:00 · Martinis 1:37:17 · Bhaskar 1:39:29 · Ho 1:40:01
QSPM Shapiro 36:47
Rabinowitz, Matthew de Masi 2:00:02 · Rabinowitz 2:03:45 · de Masi 2:07:02 · de Masi 2:45:40
Raymond, John W. de Masi 2:27:33
Sandia National Laboratories de Masi 2:27:33
SAR (synthetic aperture radar) Shapiro 36:47 · Singh 47:01 · Cardillo 2:39:32
SC250 Ho 1:40:01
ServiceNow de Masi 2:00:02 · Lokada 2:01:46 · de Masi 2:07:02
Shor's algorithm Ballance 18:36 · Singh 47:01 · Analyst 1:16:18 · Singh 1:18:35 · Ballance 1:20:02 · Sakac 1:42:36 · Cardillo 2:43:39
Short loops (prototype de-riskers) Ballance 1:20:02
Silicon Heartland Ho 1:40:01
SkyWater Technology Promotional video 3:08 · de Masi 4:40 · Ballance 18:36 · Sonderman 31:11 · Shapiro 36:47 · Singh 47:01 · Choksi 1:09:29 · Ballance 1:10:04 · Sonderman 1:11:46 · Mobley 1:13:05 · Sonderman 1:17:18 · Singh 1:18:35 · Ballance 1:20:02 · Ballance 1:23:45 · Shapiro 1:25:01 · Rakesh 1:27:01 · Bhaskar 1:27:36 · Bhaskar 1:31:00 · Martinis 1:37:17 · Bhaskar 1:39:29 · Ho 1:40:01 · de Masi 2:45:40
Space Force de Masi 2:27:33 · Raymond 2:30:47 · Raymond 2:37:39
Superion de Masi 4:40 · Ballance 18:36 · Singh 47:01 · Sakac 1:42:36
Tempo Sakac 1:42:36
Tiling Ballance 18:36 · Sonderman 31:11 · Ellis 1:22:45 · Ballance 1:23:45
Vector Atomic Singh 47:01
Walking Cat paper de Masi 4:40 · Ballance 18:36
Appendix C — The Questions From the Floor
Seven questioners took the floor at this event. Everything else said from the stage was prepared, and the difference matters evidentially: a figure volunteered under no pressure and a figure conceded under questioning are not the same kind of record. This appendix isolates the unprepared portion of the proceedings — what was asked, who answered, and what the answer reached.
Each entry cites the questioner’s turn in the heading and the answering turns beneath it, so the full exchange can be read in Part I. The questions are given in condensed form; the words as spoken are in the transcript at the cited turn.
1. John McPeak, Rosenblatt Securities — 1:08:17
Asked — At what number of physical qubits does photonic quantum interconnect become important on the roadmap.
Answered — Ballance 1:08:42
What the answer reached — No qubit number was given. The answer was that the core compute roadmap scales out well beyond millions of qubits on a five-year view without photonic interconnect, and that the customers who want photonic interconnect are those building fleets and networks rather than one large machine — which reframes the interconnect as an adjacent product line rather than a dependency of the compute roadmap.
2. Nihal Choksi, Northland Capital Markets — 1:09:29
Asked — How the design cycle was reduced from eight months to two, which lithography node IonQ runs with SkyWater, and what range of nodes SkyWater works across.
Answered — Ballance 1:10:04 · Sonderman 1:11:46 · Singh 1:12:19
What the answer reached — The node was answered directly — 90 nanometer, in a 200-millimeter fab — together with an explicit rejection of the premise that 28 nanometer and below is required. The cycle-time reduction was answered culturally rather than technically, through a supply-chain account of a part located in Korea and installed within days against a competing foundry’s two-month slip. The range of nodes SkyWater works across was not given. The figure in the question is preserved as spoken; IonQ’s release states nine months to two.
3. Gary Mobley, StoneX — 1:13:05
Asked — Whether SkyWater’s other quantum-compute customers are comfortable that IonQ’s needs will not handicap their roadmaps, and how much lead time SkyWater holds over IBM, GlobalFoundries and others.
Answered — Sonderman 1:13:58
What the answer reached — Compartmentalization was answered directly: information is compartmentalized, customers are not cross-contaminated, and no customer’s roadmap is impeded by IonQ’s needs, with the rising-tide framing that speed achieved with IonQ populates out to the rest. No lead time in months or years was given. The competitive answer was qualitative — GlobalFoundries characterized as a scaled specialty foundry that standardizes rather than an innovation engine that customises, with the note that IBM sold its microelectronics business to GlobalFoundries in 2015.
4. Analyst, unidentified — 1:16:18
Asked — Whether there is a scale-out roadmap for photonic interconnect phases three and four, and whether the manufacturing capability exists to support shorter application cycles.
Answered — Sonderman 1:17:18 · de Masi 1:18:30 · Singh 1:18:35
What the answer reached — Capacity was answered: Minnesota and Florida hold more than enough for what the compute and platform teams require, the work needs iterations rather than smartphone-scale volume, and five devices are running in parallel. Phases three and four of the photonic interconnect were not addressed at this turn; the chair deferred them to the foundry and networking section later in the program, and the CFO added that IonQ brings the capital SkyWater needs to grow the quantum foundry.
5. Quinn Bolton, Needham — 1:19:09
Asked — When there will be enough data to state median gate fidelity across the 256-qubit QPU, how confident the team is of hitting fidelity, an expansion on crosstalk, and the plan for Fab 25.
Answered — Ballance 1:20:02 · Sonderman 1:21:05 · Singh 1:22:07
What the answer reached — No date for median-gate-fidelity data was given, and crosstalk was not expanded on. The answer was about method — short-loop prototypes de-risking each element in parallel, then integrating — closing on confidence in the ultimate integrated performance and on deployments of the first systems in early 2027. Fab 25 was answered directly and twice: part of the foundry ecosystem for purchasing power and supply-chain scale, with quantum work remaining in Minnesota and Florida, and Fab 25 held as optionality that would require retooling to use.
6. Craig Ellis, B. Riley Securities — 1:22:45
Asked — What technology competencies tiling will require to execute the late-decade roadmap, and how customers are engaging across geographies and whether the US executive orders are a driver.
Answered — Ballance 1:23:45 · Shapiro 1:25:01
What the answer reached — Tiling was answered as an integration problem rather than a quantum one: die bonding to tight tolerances and an electrostatic transfer across the junction, with the team stating it sits comfortably within industry-standard tolerances and that the residual risk is operational excellence and yield rather than any single technology. On engagement, the answer was global and cross-industry demand for integrated solutions — sovereign buyers wanting PNT for GPS-denied environments alongside compute, financial services pairing applications work with a security conversation, oil and gas pairing chemistry with PNT and critical-infrastructure security. The executive-order part of the question was not addressed directly.
7. Vijay Rakesh, Mizuho — 1:27:01
Asked — How the Nexus Photonics acquisition fits the IonQ and SkyWater roadmap, what pricing looks like for 256-qubit systems, and how to model fiscal 2027 between core IonQ and SkyWater.
Answered — Bhaskar 1:27:36 · Shapiro 1:28:48 · Singh 1:28:56
What the answer reached — Nexus was answered: design and integration intellectual property paired with SkyWater manufacturing, with first impact in sensing, replacing hand-assembled discrete components and their wiring with photonic integrated circuits. Pricing was declined, and the CFO said as much in terms, answering instead on cost position, on meeting customers with either a system or quantum computing as a service, and on the intent to hold total cost of ownership advantage for the customer alongside margin expansion. The fiscal 2027 split between core IonQ and SkyWater was not given.
What the floor left open
Two questions were put and not answered. The first is a date: when there will be enough data to state median gate fidelity across the 256-qubit device, asked at 1:19:09 and left at confidence in the method. The second is the fiscal 2027 split between core IonQ and SkyWater, asked at 1:27:01 and answered on pricing philosophy instead. A third, the range of lithography nodes SkyWater works across, was asked at 1:09:29 and answered only for the node IonQ itself uses. Everything else the floor asked was answered on the record, and the answers are located above.
Appendix D — Figures and Dated Commitments
Every figure of consequence spoken from this stage, with the speaker and the turn. The index exists because the other two do not answer the question an analyst actually arrives with: not what was discussed or who was named, but who said a number, and what the number was attached to.
Figures are given as spoken. Where a figure was stated on stage and IonQ’s own release of that morning gives a different one, both are noted in the middle column and the release governs in analysis. Rhetorical and biographical numbers — the Wright brothers’ twelve seconds, years of service, tenures at prior employers — are excluded; this indexes the figures that bear on the business. A figure attributed to a third party is marked as such, and third-party figures are not IonQ’s claims.
The final group is the one to carry forward. Dated commitments are the entries that can be checked against a future quarter, and each is reproduced with the date attached exactly as it was given.
I. Revenue, guidance and transaction figures
The better part of three hundred million dollars — Quantum platform revenue IonQ was on track for this year before SkyWater closed [de Masi 4:40]
Quintupled — Revenue growth year on year [de Masi 4:40]
About twice — IonQ’s Q2 revenue against the whole rest of the public sector combined [de Masi 4:40]
A hundred and forty-eight billion dollar TAM — Third-party total addressable market figure, explicitly not IonQ’s own number [Singh 47:01]
Roughly a billion dollars — Purchase price for Oxford Ionics [Singh 47:01]
Almost two billion — Purchase price for SkyWater [Singh 47:01]
Six hundred and eight million dollars — SkyWater consensus revenue as it stood on July 30, the day before closing [Singh 47:01]
Three hundred and sixty-eight million — Of that consensus, what SkyWater delivered by IonQ’s estimation [Singh 47:01]
A hundred and twenty million — SkyWater revenue attributable to IonQ, as stated on the second-quarter earnings call [Singh 47:01]
Two hundred and forty million dollars — SkyWater revenue to IonQ for the five months of ownership this year, seventy million of it from IonQ [Singh 47:01]
Two hundred and eighty to two hundred and ninety million — IonQ guidance reaffirmed that morning, to which the SkyWater contribution is added and the seventy-million intercompany elimination subtracted [Singh 47:01]
About two million in revenue — The company’s scale when Singh joined [Singh 47:01]
Fifty-eight million dollar agreement — The It’s About Time program, cited as government validation of the sensing line [Shapiro 36:47]
Over two hundred billion dollars — Modelled saving to the US healthcare system from predicting susceptibility, Rabinowitz’s figure [Rabinowitz 2:03:45]
Two to three billion dollars a year — Research spend in the cytochrome P450 example [Sakac 1:42:36]
II. Technical performance and scale figures
Over four nines — Two-qubit gate fidelity achieved on the electronic qubit control unit cells [Ballance 18:36]
Over a 30X improvement — Core error-correction modules, the CCZ factories [Ballance 18:36]
Ten thousand qubit system — Where the Walking Cat architecture and the 256 compute fabric lead [Ballance 18:36]
Hundreds of thousands of qubits — Reached by tiling beyond the two-die, two-and-a-half-D step [Ballance 18:36]
Mega-quantum-operation — Scale of the first real-time decoding stack, built for the ten-thousand-qubit device [Ballance 18:36]
About twenty thousand physical qubits — What an IonQ system would need to recover a 256-bit elliptic curve key [de Masi 4:40]
19,397 qubits — The Q-Day requirement announced that morning [Shapiro 36:47]
Four hundred times — Increase in qubit system count from Aria to the Superion 10K [Singh 47:01]
A thousand times more accurate — IonQ quantum clocks against the best-in-class classical equivalent, in NIST’s ensemble [Shapiro 36:47]
1,000 to 10,000 times faster — Quantum Fourier transform workloads, within a range given as the same, 10x, 100x, 1,000x and 10,000x [Sakac 1:42:36]
24 percent better accuracy — Quantum algorithms applied to LLM behavior [Sakac 1:42:36]
12 then 14 amino acids — Protein folding run on Forte Enterprise and Tempo, with Tempo carrying 14 to 16 [Sakac 1:42:36]
Thirty to fifty amino acids — Scale of GLP-1s, against oxytocin’s nine [Sakac 1:42:36]
Six qubits, then fourteen — Quantum output layer as fine-tuning head on an 800-length vector embedding [Rabinowitz 2:12:54]
A 100K, or five 20K systems in parallel — What would be needed to exceed the scale of the 2025 Google and Caltech paper [Sakac 1:42:36]
III. Manufacturing and foundry figures
90-nanometer technology — The node IonQ runs with SkyWater [Sonderman 1:11:46]
200-millimeter fab — The fab environment that node runs in [Sonderman 1:11:46]
28 and below, two nanometer — The premise Sonderman rejects as a requirement for this work [Sonderman 1:11:46]
Nine different quantum customers — SkyWater’s quantum customer count as of the Qolab announcement, restated from the floor [Sonderman 31:11 · Mobley 1:13:05]
Eight months to two months — The design cycle reduction as put by the questioner; IonQ’s release of that morning states nine months to two [Choksi 1:09:29]
A two-month slip on a six-month timeline — What the competing partner was delivering at the time [Ballance 1:10:04]
More than in the history of the company — Ion-trap chips and processors built in the preceding six months [Ballance 18:36]
Five devices in parallel — What the foundry is running now [Sonderman 1:17:18]
Thousands of wafers — The scale that makes parallel cycles of learning possible [Sonderman 31:11]
2015 — When IBM sold its microelectronics business to GlobalFoundries [Sonderman 1:13:58]
IV. Dated commitments and timeline statements
Early 2027 — First Superion systems starting deployments on customer sites [Ballance 18:36]
2035 to 2030 — Migration timeline pulled in by the US executive order in June [Shapiro 36:47]
By 2029, perhaps — What Singh says others have claimed for their own timelines [Singh 47:01]
Seven months — Time taken to close the SkyWater deal [de Masi 4:40]
July 31 — Approval received, a couple of days before earnings and on the stated timeline [Singh 47:01]
A five-year view — The horizon on which the compute roadmap scales without photonic interconnect [Ballance 1:08:42]
The next five years — The window over which total cost of ownership advantage is to be held [Singh 1:28:56]
The coming twelve months — Where the board expects more of the same aggressive agenda [de Masi 2:45:40]
April 14, 2027 — World Quantum Day, when the company returns to this room [de Masi 2:45:40]
Three to five years — Vanderbilt’s arrival in Chattanooga alongside the IonQ R&D office [Long 2:08:09]
V. Organizational and record figures
About 70 people worldwide — Forward-deployed engineering, customer solutions and applications R&D, almost entirely PhDs [Sakac 1:42:36]
857 papers submitted, 20 selected — IEEE Quantum Week best-paper field [Sakac 1:42:36]
13 submitted, 10 entered, four won — IonQ’s result in that field, put at a 3.7-sigma event [Sakac 1:42:36]
Six press releases — Announcements made that morning [de Masi 4:40]
About ten years — How long EPB’s fiber network has been in place [Long 2:02:32]
