TechInnovation@TechInnovationz
$IONQ
🚨 A chip the size of a thumbnail.
A US fab with "the highest level of military security."
A CFO who says "over my dead body" to overseas foundries asking for revenue share.
That's how IonQ talked about its 256-qubit at JP Morgan this morning.
Full recap of CFO/COO Inder Singh's session below every key point, in his own words. ↓
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THE SPEAKER
Inder Singh alone on stage, opposite Harlan Sur (JPM semis analyst). No De Masi.
Bio for context: former CFO of ARM during the NVIDIA-ARM waiting period that never got approved. First independent Board member of IonQ. Watched the company go from "almost 0 revenue" to $130M. Joined as CFO/COO last September after De Masi was appointed, to execute the platform strategy.
"From a lab experiment in 2021 to being commercially deployed more and more."
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THE TECHNICAL ROADMAP
→ Ion trap native edge restated: "less errors, higher fidelity, higher coherence." Structural starting point.
→ Tempo (5th gen, 100 qubits, laser-based) is officially IonQ's LAST laser machine. Lasers scale up to 100-200 qubits before the machine becomes "too big, too expensive, too bulky, requires too much maintenance, too much downtime." Tempo will still drive the majority of computing revenue this year.
→ 256-qubit (6th gen, electronic control post-Oxford Ionics):
• Tape-outs A, B and C mentioned. B "now complete as well." Chip prototype "already developed."
• "About the size of your thumbnail."
• Compiler and the rest of the electronics being integrated now.
• Multiple prototypes running in parallel through end of 2026.
• "What we thought would take 9 months has been done in just a few." Ahead of schedule.
• Already pre-selling.
→ Quantum = exponential 2^N. Classical = Moore's Law 2×N. "When you go from 100 to 256, exponential increases in computing power."
→ Electronic control means fewer lasers, lower cost, less complexity, less downtime, lower BOM. "As the machine becomes more powerful, it becomes simpler and potentially cheaper."
→ 10,000-qubit (7th gen) already in motion. "We've not taken our eye off 256." CMOS multiplexing on mature nodes (128nm, possibly smaller). No 3nm, no 2nm "ever." Fully depreciated plant. 30 years of proven scaling behind it (AMD, NVIDIA, all of them).
→ 2030 target: 2 million physical qubits, 80,000 logical qubits. "Really, really impossible things in very, very short periods of time." Triplet strategy. Interconnects considered beyond.
→ Modular upgrade strategy post-10K: "You don't have to replace the machine anymore. You do swap outs of a few modules." Customer stickiness. Lower TCO. No 0°K operation, no dilution refrigerator, no helium.
→ Forward-deployed engineers and app developers at customers: "Make our machine become part of the customer's revenue stream, not just their cost equation."
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THE SCIENCE LOCK IS OFF
"A lot of the science breakthroughs that were needed are behind us at this point. Now it's about engineering and manufacturability."
99.99% fidelity reached = last scientific milestone, "on par with classical computing." Echoes Ballance's "physics is a sunk cost."
Any-to-any connections, unique to ion trap. Harder for the other modalities.
Walking cat architecture: ~100-page paper published, named after Schrödinger. Modularity + manufacturability + compiler + microarchitecture. "It's a self-healing machine. If it finds an error, it corrects the error itself without intervention. That's what you need for industrial scale."
Inder, half-joking: "You can have an AI agent summarize it for you, it's not a light read."
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THIS MORNING'S REVEAL
"We are a merchant supplier. In fact, we sell components to the other quantum computing companies. They don't talk about it. We don't talk about it. Some of the things that they require for their machines... their machines wouldn't work with our components."
Some competing quantum machines wouldn't run without IonQ inside.
"There is no quantum industry. There is just IonQ" takes on a new meaning.
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THE SKYWATER ORIGIN STORY, TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
Overseas foundries "amazed by how much volume we were predicting and how quickly we would need it" and unable to justify the quantum capex to their parent company. One foundry "in Stockholm" asked for revenue share. Inder's reply: "Over my dead body."
That's how IonQ pivoted to a US foundry.
→ SkyWater brings "the highest level of military security for many of the applications that they already do for the government."
→ Parallel prototyping enabled (vs one at a time overseas).
→ Component provenance + clear line of sight on the engineers + zero embedded malware.
→ "Secure enclaves... they're not always secure." IonQ refused that risk.
→ "Surety of supply and security of supply."
→ "It will be very hard to change foundries 2 years from now versus today."
→ US government "potentially being a customer in the future."
National security customers explicitly asked for that infrastructure before deploying. "We were asked to have that in place before they start to even think about deploying."
"We're starting our chip road map entirely in the SkyWater foundry."
May 8 SKYT vote takes on a different weight in this light.
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THE GEOPOLITICAL FRAME, UNFILTERED
→ Roadmap "without parallel, with all the humility" producing "machines that can do amazingly great things, things that classical just can't do, and amazingly bad things potentially at the same time."
→ Sovereign QPU as follow-up to sovereign AI factories: "Every country I've spoken with, that Niccolo our CEO has spoken with... is looking for a machine to be owned by them." Cloud is fine for learning. Ownership is required for hybrid workloads. "Next to my AI factory, next to my GPU cluster, I want a QPU."
→ Export controls anticipated: "We're operating already as if we have export controls even without them being in place today." "Wouldn't want to promise someone a 256 and not be able to sell them a 10,000 next."
→ Q-Day acceleration: "Even a year ago, people were saying it's 20 years away. Now Google and others are saying it's a few years away. So it's a question of whether it's a few years or less."
→ PNT networks jam-proof "in an environment where you have GPS being spoofed and jammed every day."
→ Networking is platform-agnostic, deployable even without compute, in multiple countries. Unique ability to connect quantum-to-quantum cross-modality. "Going back to my days at Cisco Systems: you need to be platform-agnostic, connect everything to everything."
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THE ECOSYSTEM AND TALENT BUILD
→ "One of the largest application development teams, if not the largest in the world."
→ Half a dozen end markets identified. In-house focus: life sciences, material science, financial services. Inder's own split: "Protein folding... we will do with someone else perhaps. Drug discovery, we will do for someone else perhaps. Whereas in material science and battery chemistry... we might develop that ourselves." (Earlier proof-of-concept drug discovery was done with NVIDIA on older-gen machines.)
→ The stat that lands, from a study out this morning: "There are only 5,000 quantum engineers in the world. There are a lot of quantum physicists, not many quantum engineers."
→ Targeted university investment: "Train engineers on our machine, see the benefit, then graduate as quantum engineers."
→ "We draw AI engineers from the trillion-dollar tech companies. They choose to come work with us because they think they're going to build the most cutting-edge, bleeding-edge applications that can't be simulated in a classical environment."
→ The Inder Singh signature line: "If we're building more and more powerful iPhones, we're building the App Store that goes with it at the same time."
→ "Google and Microsoft have quantum folks. Fortunately, they're not building machines. That's not their business model. IBM is, of course."
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THE COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE, CLINICAL
→ Quantinuum (preparing its IPO), also ion trap: "I wish them well." Polite, nothing more.
→ Google neutral atom pivot acknowledged without jab: "Certain advantages. I'll let those companies speak for themselves."
→ Photonics: "Lots of promise, still has some science breakthroughs. Having light travel and being entangled over very long distances is a nontrivial matter."
→ "Two are already on the trajectory: ion trap and superconducting (IBM and others behind it). The others have more development work to do."
→ "I'm not saying QPUs will replace GPUs. People would love for me to say that. I'm not saying that. It will be a hybrid world. From a CPU company (ARM), I can tell you there are still more CPUs and GPUs, believe it or not, but they all coexist together."
→ Founder 30 years ago, "whether lucky or smart, chose ion trap, allowing us to be where we are today."
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THE REAL DEFINITION OF COMPETITION, CLOSING
"The competition is probably a sovereign nation on the other side of the planet, maybe a few of them, trying to get to the same Q-Day that this country is racing to as well."
Not Quantinuum. Not IBM. Not Google. Inder confirms the De Masi Davos angle: this is a geopolitical race.
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Numbers confirmed on stage: $130M 2025 revenue. $270M top of 2026 guidance (doubling YoY at midpoint). $470M RPO. $3B cash on hand to invest long term. Five-year track record of beat and/or raise.
Platform stack coming beyond computing: sensing, atomic clocks, quantum-secure networks.
Customer pattern of record, quoted verbatim: QuantumBasel "buy a computer, and the next generation, and the next generation, and the next generation." Huge lock-in.
The IonQ thesis hasn't shifted.
It's hardened.
🔗seekingalpha.com/article/490610…
$IONQ #IonQ #QuantumComputing #JPMorgan2026l
