News on quantum computing usually follows a specific pattern. A press release is sent out. The term “historic milestone” is employed. Tech journalists attempt to convey the underlying physics in a way that their editors will find acceptable. The majority of quantum announcements end up describing advancements that won’t be commercially significant for another ten years, therefore the narrative nearly invariably fades away within 48 hours. Over the years, IonQ has made a good number of those announcements. This spring, the company has put together a number of initiatives that, when combined, are beginning to resemble the early stages of a real business rather than research-press theater.
The photonic link of two separate commercial quantum processors, which produced entanglement between devices that weren’t situated close to one another in a single cryogenic container, was the main event. This is more significant because of its implications for scaling than because of any one use case. For a long time, the prevailing belief in quantum computing has been that advancement can be achieved by packing more qubits onto a single chip. In order to achieve the same effective size without the architectural nightmare of monolithic processors, IonQ’s study proposes an alternative approach: connecting smaller commercial computers across photonic networks. With distributed systems, classical computing gradually adopted the same tactic. There, it was effective. Here, it might work.
The acquisition of SkyWater is the other story, which Wall Street has taken longer to properly process. In January, IonQ declared that it had reached an agreement to purchase SkyWater Technology, a pure-play semiconductor foundry located in Minnesota, for about $1.8 billion in cash and stock. SkyWater received advice on the transaction from Goldman Sachs. It has already received approval from shareholders. In actuality, the deal implies that IonQ will have complete control over its quantum chip pipeline for the first time, from design to production to deployment, all within the United States. Vertical integration is not an afterthought for a business that aspires to be the leading quantum supplier to the Department of Defense and other governments. It’s the whole idea.
Niccolo de Masi, the CEO, has been remarkably forthright about the strategic reasoning. He has publicly maintained that IonQ has established a “prodigious lead” over competitors such as Rigetti, D-Wave, and other venture-funded quantum firms that, according to him, are still unable to execute algorithms consistently a year after IonQ. Sober analysts typically take issue with that level of public faith, but de Masi has the evidence to support at least some of it. In 2025, the company achieved the so-called “four nines” barrier of 99.99% two-qubit gate integrity, a target that quantum hardware engineers had been pursuing for years. The difference between a quantum machine that is suitable for real-world chemistry simulations and one that is only used for academic publications is higher fidelity, which results in fewer errors in real-world computations.
Strangely, even doubtful investors should pay more attention to the revenue figures. IonQ increased its full-year 2026 projection to $260 to $270 million after seeing 755% year-over-year sales growth in Q1. For the quantum industry, which has spent the majority of its existence functioning as a glorified R&D operation funded by government grants and venture capital, those figures represent something truly new, even though they are still small in the context of the larger compute industry—Nvidia generates more revenue in a single week. IonQ’s commercial backlogs have been significantly increasing. Enterprise clients who pay for access are still able to access the company’s equipment thanks to AWS Braket. Working relationships between NVIDIA and AstraZeneca have been made public. These are not small names.
There’s a larger trend that merits consideration. For the greater part of a decade, quantum computing has been the technology that investors have wanted to believe in, but it has continuously fallen short of the timetables that its biggest proponents kept forecasting. With results that are yet experimental, the Microsoft, IBM, and Google trio has invested billions in the field. Startups like D-Wave and Rigetti have gone public, had difficulties, and are now examples of early-stage enthusiasm. In light of this, IonQ has been subtly compounded. The lab in Boulder. The quantum-safe network in Florida. the integration of SkyWater. The fidelity documents. the increase in revenue. DoD’s stance. As of yet, none of it is large enough to place the company among the top 100 tech names. It all points in the same way.
