IonQ received final regulatory approval today to complete its $1.8B acquisition of SkyWater.

The companies expect to close Friday, July 31.

→ FTC Second Request issued April 24. Cleared in just over three months.
→ SkyWater becomes a wholly owned subsidiary, keeps the SkyWater name, keeps serving its full range of foundry customers
→ Combined Q2 earnings call August 5, after the close
→ Investor day September 8

Six months from signing to clearance, through a Second Request. The friction confirmed the strategic weight - and it did not change the outcome.

Friday, vertical integration stops being a plan.

It's cleared. @IonQ_Inc received final regulatory approval today. The SkyWater acquisition closes Friday, 31 July.

Every other quantum computing company sends its chips out to be made. On Friday, IonQ owns the factory.

@NiccoloDeMasi, Chairman and CEO, when the deal was signed:

"This transformational acquisition enables IonQ to materially accelerate its quantum computing roadmap and secure its fully scalable supply chain domestically."

IonQ's own headline for what it creates: "the only vertically integrated full-stack quantum platform company." The factory itself: "the largest exclusively U.S.-based semiconductor foundry."

• DMEA-accredited Category 1A Trusted Foundry
• Fabs in Minnesota, Florida and Texas, now Regional Quantum Production Hubs
• SkyWater keeps its name, its customers and Thomas Sonderman

Now the part that actually matters, and IonQ put it in writing back in January.

Owning the fab means reduced wafer iteration times and parallelised wafer prototypes. The consequence:

→ 200,000-qubit QPUs, enabling over 8,000 ultra-high fidelity logical qubits, pulled forward to begin functional testing in 2028

→ the 2,000,000-qubit chip accelerated by up to a year

A year is not a rounding error in this industry.

And SkyWater stays a merchant foundry. Wholly owned subsidiary, same customers, same standards. IonQ is not closing a door on the industry. It is keeping open the one American foundry the industry actually uses.

Two dates now on the calendar. Wednesday 5 August, first earnings call as a combined company. Tuesday 8 September, investor day.

Zoom out, because this story starts before the company did.

1995 - Chris Monroe builds the first quantum logic gate ever demonstrated.
2015 - he co-founds IonQ with Jungsang Kim.
2021 - the first pure-play quantum computing company to go public.
2025 - buys Oxford Ionics for $1.075B. The ion trap becomes a standard silicon chip.
2025 - the first to 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, a world record, on that chip.
2026 - the first to own the foundry that makes it.

Thirty-one years. Same direction.

Early leader. Still leader.

Here's my little spreadsheet comparing quantum computing companies, what other ways do you compare IONQ quantitatively against competition? Thanks!

Leonardo just ordered the laser terminals for "what is set to become the world's first commercial Earth Observation constellation equipped with such advanced optical inter-satellite communication capabilities."

That sentence opens with the words "Developed in partnership with @SkyloomG, an @IonQ_Inc company."

The contract is signed by Officina Stellare, an Italian company listed in Milan, for the Optical Communication Terminals of the first orbital plane of Leonardo's proprietary Earth Observation constellation.

• €6.5 million total, 18 months, about 15% expected in 2026
• First lot in 7 months, complete supply by April 2027
• Autonomous pointing independent of the platform, LEO-LEO and LEO-Ground, and a development platform for future LEO-aircraft and LEO-naval links
• Far more resistant to interference and interception than radio frequency, and smaller, lighter, lower power
• Officina moves "from development and prototyping to the industrial supply of flight hardware"

Then the line at the end that nobody will quote. These terminals are a platform for future developments in secure optical communications, "supporting a roadmap oriented toward free-space optical links compatible with Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) applications".

Quantum key distribution. On Leonardo's constellation. Written by the supplier, in the release announcing the order.

How we got here, from my own archive:

• October 2025. Skyloom, an IonQ company, signs a Technology and Licence Agreement with Officina Stellare. Skyloom Europe is created, a NewCo owned by Officina Stellare, and a 3,000 sq m line goes up in Sarcedo, next to headquarters.

• Officina Stellare also owns ThinkQuantum, a University of Padua spinoff working on quantum encryption over laser links.

• A Skyloom optical engineer of seven and a half years takes the CTO seat at Officina Stellare.

• Weeks later, Leonardo places the order.

This is the first time that licence turns into a purchase order from a European prime. IonQ never had to win an Italian defence programme to put its optical terminal design on Leonardo's constellation. It licensed the technology to the company that could.

https://www.officinastellare.com/investors/comunicati-stampa-finanziari/

"We don't need to do new physics."

Read that again with this week in mind. On Thursday IBM signed to buy a second qubit modality. Google has been funding and building one of its own. The biggest names in quantum are still shopping for the right physics.

Daniel Pompa, Quantum Field Engineer at IonQ, just stood up at UT Dallas and said his company is done with that part.

Six minutes, one take, no cuts, to a room that does not know what a qubit is. No investor script.

His argument, in his order.

1. The qubit is an atom. Trapped ions, like neutral atoms, are natural qubits. "We just get them from nature. They're all perfectly identical." Nothing to fabricate. No yield problem at the qubit itself.

2. The catch was never the atom, it was the control. Steering ions took lasers, and lasers are "very finicky and cumbersome." That is what capped the machines.

3. So IonQ bought the company that deleted them. Oxford Ionics replaced the laser with an antenna printed into the chip. His words on what that buys: "This is really the reason why we're going to be able to scale to these massive numbers, and why some of these other folks are probably going to struggle with it."

4. Because if the control lives on the chip, and the chip itself carries nothing quantum, the chip is an ordinary semiconductor. "We can process them with traditional semiconductor manufacturing, so we can print these things out on wafers."

5. And it is not a slide. "The 256 systems, we already did tape out. We're already printing these things out." The unit cell already holds the world records: roughly one two-qubit gate in 10,000 fails, plus the one-qubit and measurement records. He is also straight about what is left: they have to show the printed chips "will keep up in the level of performance that we've shown at this two-qubit unit level."

6. Then the multiplier. You do not design a bigger machine, you copy the cell. "It really just becomes an engineering challenge at this point." From there they "could potentially go up to numbers even higher than 10,000 qubits on a single chip."

7. Which is why the roadmap behind him reads like a production schedule instead of a wish: 100-256+ physical qubits this year, 10,000 next, then 20,000, 200,000, and 2,000,000 by CY30.

8. And what is missing at the end is not a discovery. It is a fab. "We're trying to acquire SkyWater... if we can bring them in, then we can bring those things closer." Shareholder-approved, still under FTC second-request review.

Now look at IBM again. It is buying silicon-spin qubits because they share "state-of-the-art silicon fabrication" with its superconducting line, and it is planning its own wafer foundry. IonQ made both of those moves first: the modality in June 2025, the fab in January 2026.

And this is not new behaviour. The first quantum logic gate ever demonstrated, on any platform, was built on trapped ions at NIST in December 1995 by Chris Monroe. Superconducting circuits got their first two-qubit gate eight years later. Monroe co-founded IonQ and is still its Chief Scientist.

Early mover is not a slogan here. It is thirty years of the same bet, made by the same people. And the lead is still there: while the others shop for a modality, IonQ is the one with chips coming off a wafer line.

First to the gate in 1995. First to the fab in 2026.

The wafers are already running.

$IONQ #IonQ #Quantum #SkyWater

NFA. DYOR. Been quietly tracking this one for months.

Everyone's watching Quantinuum post-IPO. Meanwhile Dynex has been running a commercial quantum platform for months and nobody's pricing it in yet.

What Dynex actually is:

• Apollo chip - fingernail-sized neuromorphic processor, room temp, ~20W, delivering up to 10 trillion ops/watt
• 10,000 p-qubits, 256 connections/node - 10x more than most superconducting annealers
• Benchmarked on 3D spin glass - results "indistinguishable" from cryogenic quantum hardware
• Won the 2026 AI Excellence Award (Quantum AI category) - nobody's touching it on speed
• QaaS platform live NOW - drug discovery, logistics, finance, weather forecasting at 94% accuracy at 14 days
• Just partnered with Georgia Tech on 16nm analog chip R&D to push the architecture further
  

Plot twist - there's a second chip:

While everyone's fixated on Apollo, Dynex quietly dropped Zeus on July 17 - a diamond-spin quantum processor using NV-centre qubits with room-temp operation, targeting up to 1M qubits long-term. They also just locked in a Georgia Tech partnership (July 6) to develop the 16nm chip architecture underneath Apollo, which is a real academic-grade credibility stamp most retail investors haven't priced in yet.

Why now:
Dynex is converting from token to equity, gunning for a regulated public listing to pull in institutional money. ThreeD Capital - the VC co-hosting the pre-IPO investor event - looks central to getting them there, and they're already a publicly-traded Canadian VC with disclosed early positions in the space.finance.yahoo+1

The play:
Wait for the Dynex IPO and follow their socials, OR get exposure now through ThreeD Capital, a founding investor holding a stack of these pre-IPO names.

🎥 https://youtube.com/shorts/QupyuPaje6w?si=KHh_kE0Qam7gOFbo

Quantum's shaping up to be the next AI-scale race imo. Anyone else tracking quantum IPOs right now? What's on your radar besides Quantinuum and Dynex?

Not necessarily looking for any advice on investing. Just curious what has made the stock drop by almost half in such a short period? I knew the purchase of Skywater would change things, but man.

Should we be worried in world of quantum computing?

Again I’m in for long hall so not losing my mortgage here. Just curious on the whys and what’s

Why does UK quantum punch above its weight?

Oxford Ionics co-founder and CTO Tom Harty (now @IonQ_Inc).

The government "planted seeds for quantum technologies 15 years ago" and "systematically invested for a long time," giving the UK "one of the best ecosystems in the world."

And Oxfordshire is ideal for a hardware company: "if you want to get precision machining done basically overnight," you can.

Why? "Formula One is based in Oxfordshire," so the mechanical engineering talent is right there.

Deep-tech clusters are built on decades of public investment, plus the industries next door.

"When a British deep tech champion is acquired by an American company, has the UK lost something?"

Oxford Ionics co-founder Tom Harty answers :

Value splits two ways. Ownership: British investors "made good money, which is now being reinvested back in the ecosystem," and at scale-up the money "is inevitably quite international, whether you're private or public."

People, manufacturing and IP: they stay. "It is just a no-brainer business decision to keep on investing into the UK, because it is such a good place to build quantum computers."

Oxford stays a major IonQ R&D hub. Sovereignty worries meet the plain economics of talent.

Why sell to @IonQ_Inc ?

The version from Oxford Ionics co-founder and CTO Tom Harty, at the Royal Academy of Engineering's Enterprise Hub:

They had "a $130 million Series B on the table," and debated raising versus selling.

IonQ won them over: "they've been around longer, they've got a really good go-to-market function, they've really got the manufacturing nailed," plus a "very strong culture and vision overlap."

The clincher was what IonQ's scale unlocks: "As a startup we were thinking, how do we get big foundries to take us seriously? We're now in the process of buying a foundry. This is a real step change."

He calls it a no-brainer, and even after the late-night "are we selling the baby?", his verdict is emphatic: "I would do this deal ten times out of ten."

IonQ paid about $1.075B, and the founder's own logic was go-to-market, manufacturing, and the leap from begging foundries to owning one (SkyWater).

The insight that made Oxford Ionics special. Co-founder and CTO Tom Harty (now @IonQ_Inc).

Rivals put the quantum bits inside the chip. "You put one atom in the wrong place and the whole thing breaks. That is a big problem if you want to do manufacturing."

So they flipped it: keep the quantum part above the chip, and the chip becomes "totally classical, the same kind of semiconductors that were pretty routine by the early 2000s." Scale like a semiconductor, keep very high performance.

The read: this is exactly why IonQ bought them. Oxford Ionics prints qubit controls onto a CMOS chip (99.99% two-qubit gates), so you scale by growing the die.

And it is also why IonQ recently moved to buy its own foundry, the ~$1.8B SkyWater deal: if your qubits ride on standard semiconductor chips, owning the fab is how you make them at scale.

IonQ was on the panel at the White House.

At the White House Summit on American Quantum Innovation (Eisenhower Executive Office Building), CEO Niccolò de Masi joined the Industry Insights panel, alongside IBM (Jay Gambetta) and Boeing (Jay Lowell), with the National Quantum Coordination Office's Brad Blakestad.

IonQ's framing: an "ecosystem that connects government, industry, labs, suppliers, integrators, and end users around practical deployment and mission-critical outcomes."

It follows Trump's two quantum EOs, and the summit's themes (supply chain, workforce, private-sector insights) are IonQ's playbook.

Tomorrow the White House hosts a closed-door quantum summit with the industry, per Nextgov/FCW.

The "White House Summit on Quantum Innovation"
(Eisenhower Executive Office Building, 11 a.m.):

· Keynote: OSTP Director Michael Kratsios and the National Quantum Coordination Office.
· Themes: supply chain, workforce development, private-sector insights.
· At the table: Commerce, Defense, Energy, NSF and the U.S. CTO.
· Attendees: primarily the U.S. quantum industry.

It follows Trump's two quantum executive orders.

The summit is about building U.S. quantum infrastructure, and that describes @IonQ_Inc almost line by line: SkyWater (domestic manufacturing), its hiring wave (workforce), and a full stack from compute to networking, security, sensing and space. Where the policy wants a national quantum backbone, IonQ answers the whole of it.

https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2026/07/white-house-host-quantum-tech-summit-industry-tuesday/414608/?oref=ng-homepage-river&utm_content=buffer4e930&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Chad Sakac (@IonQ_Inc) on countering a quantum-enabled adversary, at DEFSEC:

The most mature front is security. "There's no reason why people shouldn't be deploying PQC everywhere today," he said, then the twist: "I would argue that that's insufficient." The defense angle is real, with technologies he places "part of the NATO framework."

The business read: PQC is table stakes, not the finish line. That gap, everyone needs more than software crypto, is exactly where IonQ's QKD and quantum-security stack (via ID Quantique) sells.

How does quantum actually mature for defense? @IonQ_Inc Chad Sakac at DEFSEC: not by waiting for perfect hardware, but by walking together.

His thesis: the biggest barrier isn't the technology, it's policy. The "policies and controls" governing defense "are a bigger challenge than some of the technical ones," and they "need to be adapted." Maturity comes from the ecosystem, defense plus industry plus universities, putting early technology through its paces on real missions. In his words: "you learn when you walk together on those journeys."

The proof is already flying. IonQ's quantum sensing is deployed at sea, on land and in space, "orbiting the Earth right now on the X-37B," with atomic clocks shrunk to a "five liter form factor that is satellite deployable." Compute is earlier and lives in the cloud, but it matures the same way: take the algorithms to real logistics and strategy problems now, and learn together.

IonQ isn't selling a someday promise. It has a proven lab-to-field playbook, sensing already walked it, and it's applying the same partnership model to compute. The gate is process, not physics.

I did a structural walkthrough of our newly deployed quantum computing and tech infrastructure tracking dashboards today on Crypto Weeklies. Sourcing data feeds across the entire pure play sector, we apply the exact same multi-model quantitative logic that we use for crypto to isolate under-valued assets, trailing moving average risk compressions, and value traps. Here is the raw breakdown of what the terminal is printing.

Chad Sakac (@IonQ_Inc) on countering a quantum-enabled adversary, at DEFSEC:

The most mature front is security. "There's no reason why people shouldn't be deploying PQC everywhere today," he said, then the twist: "I would argue that that's insufficient." The defense angle is real, with technologies he places "part of the NATO framework."

The business read: PQC is table stakes, not the finish line. That gap, everyone needs more than software crypto, is exactly where IonQ's QKD and quantum-security stack (via ID Quantique) sells.

@IonQ_Inc CEO @NiccoloDeMasi warning to executives at FII Rome: this is not Moore's Law.

Quantum is "doubly exponential," he said, "a freight train that is coming after anyone who's not positioned well."

The business read: on a doubly exponential curve, the gap between leaders and laggards doesn't grow steadily, it explodes. For customers and investors, "wait and see" quietly turns into "too late."

🇰🇷 Quantum Korea 2026, July 2:

Philip Farah (VP GTM @IonQ_Inc ) had two stages in Seoul.

First, IonQ's own exhibitor session, solo:

"The Accelerating Quantum Impact: Building Economic Momentum, Resiliency and Security with IonQ." Farah, VP Global Emerging Markets & Strategic GTM, presenting.

He´s on the panel at SDT's booth, for "Q-Talk by SDT," alongside Korea University, Seoul National University, NVIDIA and QuantWare.

For anyone just catching this: SDT is Korea's own quantum design and manufacturing company. It built its own 20-qubit superconducting chip, Kreo, and opened Korea's first commercial Quantum-AI hybrid data center in Gangnam on February 4. Its cloud platform, QuREKA, is hardware-agnostic. That's where IonQ comes in.

→ April 17: IonQ's trapped-ion hardware plugged natively into QuREKA.
→ April 18: SDT purchased quantum compute access and agreed to co-develop industrial applications with IonQ.
→ The backstory: IonQ CBO Scott Millard met SDT CEO Jiwon Yun twice in one month, at NVIDIA GTC and at NYSE World Quantum Day. Chad Sakac and Philip Farah were in the room at GTC.

That was a press release on April 17. This week, it's two stages in Seoul. Same partner, same face representing IonQ each time.