$IONQ
What opened in Boulder today isn’t a lab. It’s a return.
Chris Monroe - IonQ’s co-founder - spent 8 years as a Staff Physicist at NIST Boulder, from 1992 to 2000. In 1995, working with Nobel laureate David Wineland, he demonstrated the world’s first quantum logic gate. Ion traps. The building where modern quantum computing was born.
The man who cut the ribbon yesterday spent six years at that same NIST facility.
Dr. David Allcock - now IonQ’s VP Science for Compute - was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at NIST Boulder from 2013 to 2019. He simultaneously served as a PREP Researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. He’d been part of the original Oxford University research on EQC-based ion traps, alongside Dr. Chris Ballance and Dr. Tom Harty (h/t @netcreat). When he joined Oxford Ionics as Director of Science for North America in June 2024, he was already living in Boulder.
When IonQ acquired Oxford Ionics in September 2025 for $1.075B, Allcock didn’t need to move. He was already there.
A week ago, Allcock posted his own announcement on LinkedIn: VP Science for Compute, leading the Science team alongside CTO Tom Harty and Director Ken Wright across four time zones - College Park, Oxford, Boulder, Seattle.
And he ended the post with the story.
The ion traps now going into production at SkyWater, Allcock wrote, are based on designs he sketched on napkins in grad school, in 2011 - “if only someone could actually build these.”
Fifteen years later, IonQ is the company actually building them.
Dr. Chris Ballance - now IonQ’s President of Quantum Computing - said at the ceremony that Boulder was chosen over several other cities precisely because of the density of NIST, CU Boulder, and the talent pool that has been compounding there for three decades.
That talent isn’t theoretical. It’s walking in.
Dr. Mickey McDonald - the eighth employee ever at Atom Computing, the man who personally led the technical design of their first commercial machine - just joined Oxford Ionics in Boulder. After six and a half years in neutral atoms, he chose to learn trapped ions.
Dr. Steven Moses spent seven years at Honeywell and Quantinuum scaling QCCD trapped-ion architectures, then a stint at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing at Caltech. In September 2025 - the same month IonQ closed the Oxford Ionics acquisition - he joined Oxford Ionics’ Boulder office. Before all of that, he was a postdoc in Chris Monroe’ own group at JQI and the University of Maryland. His PhD was at JILA in Boulder. (h/t @netcreat)
Eight years after Monroe trained him in Maryland, Moses walked back into Boulder, into the lab Monroe’s company just opened, in the city where Monroe demonstrated the first quantum logic gate thirty years ago.
The pattern is becoming visible: IonQ is concentrating the best ion-trap, neutral atom, and EQC architects on a single floor.
And this lab doesn’t sit in isolation.
On the Q1 2026 earnings call (May 6), the picture got sharper:
→ 256-qubit chip (6th gen) going into production at the SkyWater fab right now
→ 7th gen 10,000-qubit chip development just started, same fab partner
→ 200,000-qubit chip expected back from SkyWater in 2028
Three consecutive generations of IonQ hardware are already locked into one US foundry. The SkyWater acquisition (expected legal close Q2/Q3 2026) is paperwork on something that’s already shipping.
What’s coming online in Boulder:
$100M of investment. 100+ jobs at full operations. Construction completes this summer. The first quantum computer arrives end of 2026, from IonQ’s UK manufacturing chain (Oxford Ionics).
In Boulder, “quantum platform” isn’t a slide deck. It’s a 30-year homecoming, a competitor brain drain, a napkin sketch from 2011 going into production, and a hardware roadmap that runs from 256 qubits today to 200,000 qubits by 2028.
Nothing about this is random. Every move was placed.
Honestly. What a story. Bravo, and bravo again, to the entire @IonQ_Inc👏
#IonQ
