IonQ at Morgan Stanley Conference: Quantum Networking Expansion

On Tuesday, 04 March 2025, IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) presented at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. The company’s new CEO, Niccolo Massey, outlined IonQ’s strategic focus on expanding its quantum networking capabilities, which he believes will double the company’s Total Addressable Market (TAM). While IonQ is making strides in commercial leadership and customer ecosystem development, its stock faced a decline recently.

Key Takeaways

• IonQ is expanding into quantum networking, potentially doubling its TAM.
• The company emphasizes GAAP revenue over bookings as a key metric.
• IonQ has secured significant partnerships and a $94.5 million contract with the Air Force Research Lab.
• Growth from a small team to 500 employees indicates increasing talent in the quantum sector.
• IonQ aims for nine figures in GAAP revenue next year, with strategic acquisitions bolstering its portfolio.

Financial Results

• IonQ provided 2024 guidance of $75 million to $95 million in GAAP revenue.
• The company is transitioning its focus from bookings to GAAP revenue as a primary metric.
• IonQ is targeting nine figures in GAAP revenue for the following year.

Operational Updates

• IonQ delivered a system to the Air Force Research Lab under a $94.5 million contract.
• Partnerships include AstraZeneca for drug discovery, General Dynamics for anomaly detection, ANSYS for computational engineering, and Airbus for logistics.
• The new AQ64 system is 270 million times more powerful than its predecessor, AQ36 (Forte).
• IonQ is expanding into quantum networking through acquisitions of Cubatech and IDQ.
• The workforce has grown significantly, from 35-40 to 500 employees.

Future Outlook

• IonQ plans to develop applications beyond the AQ64 system, focusing on customer results.
• The company envisions becoming a major player in public markets, akin to ARM.
• IonQ foresees quantum computing, networking, and sensing expanding into all areas of applied science.
• Continued investment in quantum networking is crucial for national security and economic growth.
• SK Telecom is set to become a 1.5% to 2% shareholder through a stock-based partnership.

Q&A Highlights

• IonQ aims to cover the full value chain of quantum networking, offering solutions for data transmission and random number generation.
• The company sees itself as a key player in the quantum Internet, focusing on secure communication.
• Partnerships with government agencies and companies aim to establish secure network solutions.
• IonQ is integrating quantum random number generator chips into devices like the Samsung Galaxy Quantum five.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference:

Joe Moore: All right. Welcome back, everybody. I’m Joe Moore, very happy to have

Unidentified speaker: with us today. This is actually the fifth

Joe Moore: new CEO that I’ve hosted at our conference. I’m cheating with two, but

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: hopefully, I figured out. But crucially, it’s the best one.

Joe Moore: Yes, there you go. But Niccolo Massey, newly minted CEO of IonQ. So maybe you could just give us a little bit of a sense of your background and what led to the transition to CEO and then we can

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Sure. Yes. So I’m a physicist originally. I was actually one of the original sponsors of the INQ IPO in 2020. And Peter Chapman and I have been working together really closely since before INQ is a public company.

I’ve been following the quantum computing space for over twenty five years. I’ve actually been following INQ’s progress in foundational research since probably the mid to late ’90s. And in fact, Chris Monroe, our Founder, I would argue, kicked off the physical manifestation of Doctor. Richard Feynman’s work in theoretical space in the 70s. And so INQ has been thinking about the commercialization of quantum computing a long time.

Peter and I have been talking for a while on how we can work together on a more full time basis. And since we’ve expanded aggressively and successfully into quantum networking in the past six months, both organically and via a couple seminal acquisitions, the need for more bandwidth at the top of the company, so to speak, has increased and we felt the full year result was a good time to make that evolution happen. Peter has not gone anywhere. We continue to work together every day as we have in the past and we’ve made all the strategic decisions together. And as a result of that, it’s seamless.

We’re able to execute at pace, and we’re very optimistic about our ability to effectively double the TAM of the company via our networking expansion and continue on with the quantum computing core without missing a beat.

Joe Moore: Great. So I wonder, you touched on some of this, but talk about your priorities for kind of year one, where you want to take this. And I’ve been covering you guys for almost two years. And at that time, you talked about being a couple of years away from realizing kind of commercial results. So maybe give us some sense of that.

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Yes. So INQ has been the commercial leader in this space. I’d say more from the IPO because it’s been a priority for us. We’re a big believer that new platform transitions in the computing space tend to be won by the players that build the richest and deepest ecosystem, right? And so our ecosystem of customers via hardware sales, by effectively selling power by the hour and access to our machines via the cloud has been one that’s led us to have a global customer base, a lot of commercial and private companies, a lot of, of course, sovereign nations as well.

That remains the top priority along with growing our quantum networking business. And the two are complementary. In fact, not only were our customers asking us to do more in quantum networking in the last year or two, but ultimately, our fundamental photonic interconnect IP that allows us to scale our rack stacks and mounted quantum computing architecture allows us to have an edge and lead on that networking front. So we are organically growing networking, we’re inorganically growing networking, and we’re already doing useful things for our customers today and we were last year. I think it’s sort of a hallmark of INQ is that we believe we can succeed not only when we have even more logical qubits, but we’re succeeding today with our four day system that has 36 qubits, other than qubits.

And we were succeeding back at the IPO when we had maybe 18 logical qubits to also do useful things for customers. So it’s a we consider ourselves to be the 800 pound gorilla of the quantum computing business. We have nine thirty three patents, 400 in networking, 500 in computing. And we continue to build that momentum and that moat with every customer on every geography we’re in.

Unidentified speaker: And maybe you could talk

Joe Moore: a little bit about that core technology. I feel like when we think of quantum, think about low temperature superconductors, things like that, your methodology, IonTrap, is significantly different. Can you talk about what’s different about it and why you think it’s commercializable before those superconductor?

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Yes. I mean, look, I follow the space for a long time. There are multiple approaches to manifesting a theoretical quantum computer. I think it is pretty well agreed and it has been for the last five plus years that because we can do this at room temperature, because we have high fidelity kind of naturally perfect cubits in the form of individual ions that we trap obviously with lasers, We’re able to get to double digit logical qubits faster than everybody else. And we expect we’ll get to a triple digit number of logical qubits faster than everybody else.

But what we’re focused on honestly are customer results. So there are different benchmarks. We have a lot of customers because our customers run algorithms on our machines and they get better results with our machines than any other option they might come across. That’s not to say that in fifteen years, it’s possible that someone might come out of left field. But the reality is who we run into with our customers, it’s a very short list, right?

We’re not competing with everyone in the private space who has raised around. We’re not even competing with $1,000,000,000,000 market cap companies that have announced prototypes in the quantum space. Most of these sort of early stage efforts from people in the quantum ecosystem, quantum hardware ecosystem, they’re effectively announcing something akin to where INQ was in 02/2005, ’20 ’10, ’10, ’15 years ago, even before we were spun out of a lab and became a commercial company. So the technical prowess that we’ve exhibited the last fifteen years is a mixture of having thought about it longer than other people, having been an early partner to commercial and government agencies. And it’s frankly showcased by our customer ecosystem, right?

It’s very difficult for most investors who are not advanced degree physicists to read all these white papers and decide who’s ahead today, let alone who’s going to win in 02/1935 or 02/1940. But it’s pretty easy for everyone at this conference to understand GAAP revenue and understand customer traction, right? And so just like I don’t think you have to be a better physicist than the technical team at NVIDIA to buy NVIDIA stock or Broadcom or whatever. You shouldn’t have to be an expert on computing to understand what’s going on at INQ versus all our other brethren, who are only doing one piece of the quantum business, right? We have an R and D roadmap.

We have an engineering team. We’re selling and manufacturing systems. We have an applications team. We’re doing useful things for customers. We have a customer success team.

We’re effectively doing all aspects of a fully fledged business. Most people who are in the private space or startup, they’re just doing the R and D pipeline. They’re just doing the lab work.

Joe Moore: So I don’t want to go too far down the rabbit hole because I agree with everything you just said about not trying to be a physicist and not trying to understand this at a PhD level, but there is quite a bit of debate about the proper benchmarks and kind of qubit benchmarking wars. You guys have historically talked about algorithmic Qubits, which you said is more relevant. And then it sounds like from the call you’re sort of refining that a little bit. So can you just talk about the benchmarking of this stuff?

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Yes. I mean, so for those of you that are meeting with us at this conference, we’ll walk you through, I think it’s Slide 15 in our presentation. Come see us if you haven’t seen it yet. I think kind of like benchmarks for investment banks and financial services firms, you can always find a different lead table. For all the leaders.

Yes. And so honestly, it’s kind of like our move to GAAP revenue. It’s like we can find the benchmarks, but at the end of the day, our customers need to speak for us, right? They do the best diligence because we’re actually running things that solve useful problems they pay us for. Everyone can give away stuff, right?

But getting paid to do things is the sign that you’re actually ahead and actually tackling problems in today’s era of what we would call commercial advantage, right? There’s big debates about quantum supremacy, right? In an era where you absolutely have no chance of doing anything near that problem set with a classical computer. But today, we’re taking pieces of problems and coming up with better solutions for customers, not always faster, but better solutions for customers and a whole array of applied science, right? And so algorithmic Qubits, I think, start to lose meaning at a certain point in a certain scale.

And so we talked about it in the earnings call last week. We’re going to announce our AQ64 system, our guidance is by the end of the year. That machine is, I think, two seventy million times more powerful than the AQ36 system that we call Forte today. After AQ64, we’re focusing on customer results. So that’s a mixture of tailoring the application with the machine.

Yes, it will have more of what people would call a logical qubit of some kind. And there’s a general agreement around you probably need triple digit numbers of qubits to do certain types of problem solving, cracking RSA and these sorts of things. But we’re demonstrating that we can do a lot of useful things with double digit qubits. And most importantly, I think, for everyone to understand and I’ve been a fan of this since the IPO is the fact that our machines are improving, doubling in power every time we add a logical cubit effectively, right? So it’s not Moore’s Law every 18 months or 24 months.

It’s sometimes it’s Moore’s Law every month even, right? And so our pricing power, if you will, with our customers, clients and so on is almost unprecedented. You don’t want to be tendering in the aerospace for the next, whatever, stealth bomber and then find out that your competitor has a machine that’s two seventy million times more powerful. Same in the drug discovery world, same in the logistics world. That is not a winning competitive advantage kind of thing for your company when you’re the CEO and you say, well, the other guys beat us because they paid for the best machine we used last year’s.

Joe Moore: Great. So maybe digging into some of the workloads and applications, Jensen made kind of offhand comments at CES to tank their stock, and I don’t think it was intended to be. But now you’re going to be at the NVIDIA GTC conference later this month with a Quantum Day. Can you just talk about generally how you fit into an AI ecosystem and maybe give us some sense of that whole kerfuffle from Jensens?

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Yes. I mean, look, we have a partnership with NVIDIA around drug discovery using CUDA. Peter Chapman, our Executive Chairman and my colleague, I think, has had a spirited debate with Jensen since the IPO, quite honestly, on and off, both privately and publicly. I think that everybody has a grain of and foundation of accuracy in off the cuff comments, right? So I think our GAAP revenue is not likely to be the size of NVIDIA’s next quarter, and we’re not guiding towards that.

At the same time, we’re patently proving that it is not true that you can’t do useful things with quantum today on our machines. That doesn’t mean you can do useful things on everyone’s machines. There are a whole host of start ups that are telling venture capitalists that they’re going to come out and smash NVIDIA and Broadcom any moment now or certainly in 02/1935. I don’t know how many of you would invest in that. I don’t find it hugely credible, right?

People in the tech ecosystem have demonstrated for decades, but particularly the last decade, that if you get all the customers and you have all the momentum and you build the ecosystem, right, you tend to be the winner, right? Facebook bought what’s happened to Instagram, not the other way around. Look at Oracle, forty years on, with that relational database. And so I think the big get bigger, we consider ourselves to be the 100 pound gorilla of the quantum computing space. We are the only quantum commercial business.

And we continue to show that you can walk and chew gum. You can drive your tech roadmap. You can drive commercialization. We’re well capitalized and we’re using those resources to make sure we win at both. Because at the end of the day, everyone’s got to turn into a business that’s judging the same metrics as any other business.

Joe Moore: Great. And sticking with compute, I want to get to networking as well. But sticking with quantum compute, what other applications outside of AI are you finding commercial use cases? And where are you now with doing things that can’t be classically simulated?

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Yes. So look, half of probably what we are being paid for is classified. So I’m not going to talk about any of that. But we announced the delivery of one of our systems to the Air Force Research Lab this morning. That’s a $94,500,000 contract that involves a couple of systems networks together, right?

So that is both a compute and a networking partnership. We’ve also announced that we’re doing drug discovery work with AstraZeneca. We’ve announced that we’re doing anomaly detection and fraud detection with General Dynamics. We’re doing computational engineering work with ANSYS. We’re doing logistics work with Airbus.

All of these companies are working with us because we can help them today, but most of all, they know we can help us a lot more help them a lot more next year and the year after. It’s not to Jensen’s point, it’s not double digit number of years away from helping them. It’s double digit weeks away in some cases for us and it’s continual improvement. I mean, our market cap is about the same as NVIDIA’s ten years ago. And I’m not saying that we’re necessarily the same improvement curve, but we may well be because as everyone in this room has seen, the network effects very much accrue to the leader.

Joe Moore: Okay, great. And outside of compute, you made a push into networking. You’ve done a number of acquisitions. Can you talk about sort of those acquisitions and kind of what your networking roadmap looks like?

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Yes. So it’s a global portfolio. We are the only listed company in The U. S. That has a leadership position in networking.

It’s about 400 of our 900 patents. And it is a fairly broad portfolio. So we’re not selling only 8 figure deals or even 7 figure deals. We’re ultimately able to sell a more diversified portfolio worldwide. Between our organic networking investment, Cubatech and our acquisition of IDQ, we have a leadership position that is difficult for anyone to encroach upon.

I think there’s maybe one company in Asia that’s part of a bigger conglomerate that does a fair amount of networking as well. But otherwise, it’s just startups, right? So we’re very excited about networking because it more or less doubles the TAM, if you believe McKinsey’s research report of late on networking. And it’s complementary for our technical roadmap and sales team. We are able to sell both.

It’s actually the fundamental tenant of how we’re scaling our quantum hardware is through photonic interconnects that are exactly the same kind of thing we’re going to use to secure the quantum Internet, so to speak. And we’re finding that not only are the additional customers we brought in complementary, Singtel, SK Telecom, JPMorgan and so on that have come with the IDQ acquisition, but we’re effectively demonstrating that we’re moving where the market has most demand today from our customers in the quantum networking computing space.

Joe Moore: And is quantum networking, quantum compute on a similar timeline? Or is one seems like there’s a general consensus that networking is commercializable earlier, but I’m not sure if that’s true for you.

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Yes. I mean, we haven’t broken out revenue in our guidance this year between the two halves. I will say that some of our biggest partners in the last year are combo contracts, if you will, right? We want to see both like Air France, we want to see compute and networking. We think they go together, right?

We’re almost in the code making, code breaking, the safe cracking, safe building business here, if you will. I think for other companies besides us, they’re far behind our networking business for their computing hardware commercialization. For us, they’re broadly similar, if I were to sort of put a finger in the air for this year and next year.

Joe Moore: And talking about the M and A that you’ve done, I mean, you have the certainly the most financial resources of the other sort of dedicated quantum companies. Do you see other areas where you can do acquisitions to add to the portfolio? Is that still part of the strategy?

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Well, it’s part of the strategy of every public company, I think, on some level. We will always look, of course, to bolster the IP mode that we have. We’ll look to accelerate our ability to bring customers what they’re demanding. We have a quantum sensing piece in the IDQ acquisition. And so that’s an area that we can invest further in accelerating because like networking that’s at about the same pace and position on the commercialization front.

But I actually think applied quantum computing, networking and sensing is going to continue to effectively cascade out in every area of applied science, right? So I’m heartened tremendously by the fact that at our IPO four or five years ago, very few people in this room or in the Fortune 500 C Suite knew what quantum computing really was. And here we are four years on, nobody doubts that there’s a quantum computing business. You can debate the size. We can debate the size by year or even by quarter.

And we can debate the size of hardware versus software versus networking versus sensing.

Joe Moore: I think the timeline is still a big debate.

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Well, it’s size against timeline. Yes. Size against timeline, right? So there is I mean IBM and INQ, the two eyes, are the ones generating the revenue today, right? We bump into each other, I think, in customer engagements and contracts and so on.

Pretty much everybody else is in the R and D business, right? And so let’s see how that race plays out. But historically, who spends the most on R and D? It’s the customers that commercialize the first because they have the money. I mean, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Broadcom, like you wouldn’t bet against their R and D operations.

They can afford a lot there, right? So I think the TAM is growing as customers get acclimated by people like ourselves on the other eye. We’re working with customers to translate their problems into in fact, we recast them as a problem that can be run on a quantum computer, ours in our case. We’re working with their application teams and ours to make sure that we can solve that problem, give them useful results and iterate, right? And I think that ecosystem will keep building, keep deepening, keep getting broader.

When I met INQ, that was a 35, 40 person business. Today, it’s 500. And yes, we’re resource constrained. That’s a high class problem for companies growing nicely, but I’m really excited by the fact that there is just so much more talent coming into the space now in every layer.

Joe Moore: Great. So I wonder if we could look at some of the near term investment opportunities within the space that you guys could be beneficiaries of, maybe starting with the Department of Energy Quantum Leadership Act and then 2,500,000,000 Can you talk about that and how it affects you guys?

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Yes. I mean, I think it’s safe to say that we’re in the mix on everything. It is a nonpartisan issue, right? That’s the most important thing I’m going to say. We’ve been through we’re on the third administration that agrees that this is a national security priority and just a national priority in general.

True for AI, true for defense, true for drug discovery, true for logistics, it’s true for energy. One of the things that I think is maybe not appreciated sufficiently is the physical space and energy advantages that our quantum computing solution bring. So if you look at our AQ 36 Forte enterprise system we’re selling, it’s the size of two refrigerators, okay? And it plugs into a wall socket. There is no nuclear power plant that has to be connected to it.

We don’t need a football field, right?

Joe Moore: Even when we were in your Analyst Day, you just stand next to it and we’re talking and it’s just right there.

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Yes. And so will we need a bit more space as we stack more of them together? Yes, but we’re also miniaturizing. And so there’s a miniaturization effort. That’s why you can imagine people like the Air Force care about that because they care about can you be local on something that might be in the air someday.

We think we can save approximately an order of magnitude of the energy that’s being used in certain problem sets in classical analogs, paradigms. And so energy will not constrain us. Space will not constrain us, right? We’re also room temperature. There’s no freezing required for INQ.

That’s really remarkable if you think about it, right? Almost everybody else that is trying to have a quantum computing hardware solution has something that’s not particularly robust about it, Either needs a lot of space, needs to be really cold or parts of the memory compute solution haven’t been figured out and they are requiring fundamental leaps in science. We are an engineering centric company because the fundamental leaps have been made and our architecture is freely available. Like we’re really connecting our multi core systems together with our photonic interconnect, that is our quantum networking, that is how we’re going to scale. And I think we’re going to get there before everybody in terms of having more logical qubits.

I think we’ll carry our customer ecosystem with us. And I think our customers are going to like the fact that we can not only sell them networking but compute together and sensing as it fits into their roadmap and ours.

Joe Moore: And you’ve also had a number of business relationships with AFRL with airports. Can you talk about the importance of that relationship and why it seems like they’ve selected you as a key partner in a lot of these applications?

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Yes. I mean, we’ve had three I think we have three bites of the apple with them. We announced this morning that we just delivered the first major system of two. They want those two systems networked together. I think it’s safe to say that we’ve had aerospace interest in I and Q right the way back to the IPO.

And that room temperature, that miniaturization, that modularization are all part of those reasons. I can’t tell you exactly what we’re doing with them obviously, but it’s almost an 9 figure contract in total. And it’s not the only thing that we’re doing with branches of the military and their research labs. So there’s a lot of interest, a lot of budgets. People are solving for different things in different orders.

We’re a solution led, customer led business here, but we’re very proud of the fact that we are supporting our country’s national security needs. And at the same time, we’re finding the ability to prioritize non defense related partners as well.

Joe Moore: Yes. I guess, on those lines, the state of Maryland also announced $1,000,000,000 investment. Can you obviously, the partner there, can you talk about that relationship as well?

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Yes. No, we’ve had a great partnership with University of Maryland and Maryland as a state. Obviously, we’re headquartered in College Park. The original research was done there. I think University of Maryland has been a leader in quantum research really through our founders’ labs and the original IP that we generated and licensed from the university.

They continue to want to be, if you will, the Silicon Valley of the quantum ecosystem, and we’re at the forefront of that $1,000,000,000 initiative that they are effectively getting state funding for. It will be an increase most likely in the size of our footprint there. So it will be more space for research, more space potentially for manufacturing, certainly more space for applications, our headquarters and our employees. And it will also have a continued quantum center and connectivity with the state as well as the university for every piece of the stack that we need between R and D to engineering to applications to customer success. And of course, we love the connection to the national security apparatus that comes with a state that’s very much in the center of that, the heart of that.

Joe Moore: Great. So just one quick financial question that we’ve been getting. You went away from bookings as a metric. Can you talk about why bookings are no aren’t relevant really going forward?

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: Sure, sure. Yes, I mean, Peter Chapman has been raising this with our Board and myself for at least a couple of years. And to quote him on the earnings call last week, he said we’re going to be doing 9 figures of GAAP revenue certainly next year. This year’s guidance is $75,000,000 to $95,000,000 and he sort of keeps asking when we’re going to take the training wheels off. So at the end of the day, AQ 64 makes sense.

Beyond that, it’s difficult to measure and define exactly how an AQ looks relative to other benchmarking metrics like the problem set size and fidelity. We think that it’s part of becoming a real company and continue to demonstrate that we’re the leader in commercialization. We’re the leader in doing things for customers today and we’re the leader in applying quantum. At the end of the day, it’s like the proverbial sound of the woods that no one hears. It doesn’t really matter if you have the best sound of the woods no one hears.

We think quantum is about being the best commercial business, being the only quantum business that actually is regulated by the SEC, Sarbox, etcetera. We put one foot in front of each other every quarter, every year. We keep doing what we say we’re going to do. And I think focusing people on a metric that can be understood by everyone in the room or in the conference is important. We don’t expect you to be experts on R and D decisions, engineering decisions any more than you are on other things, other businesses in the technology ecosystem.

And we want to measure ourselves by customer success and customers paying us for the work we’re doing because at the end of the day, they’re speaking for us and they’re doing that due diligence for the investing community.

Joe Moore: Okay, great. So I just have one more question and then we’ll open it up to the audience for questions. But kind of just an overarching question that I’ve asked you guys like after every earnings call. I feel like when you talk to some of the cloud decision makers, they sort of talk about quantum as being a ways away, five years away from being five years away. And I’ve sort of asked you about that and you’ve said, well, that’s because their technology is our technology is commercializable much sooner.

Like when is the point of realization around that? When is it because I feel like if everybody thought that way, there would be a lot more acquisitions in the quantum space. There would be a lot more the incumbents who would be worried about your encroachment would be starting to be. We haven’t really seen that yet. So what do you think is the tipping point that maybe makes this clear to everybody that you are closer to commercialization than people think?

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: The funny thing is, I think that point has shifted simply because what were $100,000,000,000 market cap companies are now multitrillion dollar market cap companies, right? And so when you’re at the side I think Arm is in this room in a session or two. They were a $30,000,000,000 40 billion dollars acquisition for SoftBank. Now they’re maybe $130,000,000,000 market cap business. When you’re that size and that size business, you’re going to look at us in a different way than you will when it’s $3,000,000,000,000 And we’re currently $75,000,000 to $95,000,000 of GAAP revenue is a rounding error, right?

The funny thing about the commercialization common with the cloud players is we were the only quantum computer at our IPO that operates on Google, Amazon, Microsoft’s cloud and you can access our four day system through that. Today, four years later, we’re still the only system on that. Those companies’ own R and D efforts are not on their own cloud and no one else in our space is on all three of them, right? So on one hand, I’d say, quantum is very much here today. On the other hand, as you said for our GAAP revenue, like I said, I’m not pretending that I’ve got Jensen’s GAAP revenue next quarter, right?

And so companies with $1,000,000,000,000 market caps can afford to wait until they acquire something that shows up on their P and L, I think is a big piece of it. At the same time, obviously, we’re enjoying building this ecosystem out and showing that we will continue to be the 800 pound gorilla of the quantum space. And I think that we have a path to being a disruptor as well as successful independent business. I think every public company can be bought and sold. That’s a reality.

But we’re a young team. We’re excited about the progress we have to date. We’re excited about how far we’ve gotten since the IPO. And we think it’s very much early in capturing all the value on the upside that we can be. And there’s no reason why we’re not an ARM sized business in the public markets in the next few years.

And that can happen, by the way, on the networking side alone or the computing side alone. Either one can be 10 times the size of our business today, 100 times the size of our business today.

Joe Moore: All right. Very helpful. Let me see if we have questions from the audience.

Unidentified speaker: Yes. You mentioned quantum networking. So can you give us a sense of what part of the value chain you want to be positioned in quantum networking? And then maybe if you can enlighten us on the end game of quantum networking. Is that some sort of Internet two point zero?

And then what will be your role in the long term? And what are you targeting in that space? So

Niccolo Massey, CEO, IonQ: we have partnerships with three little agencies on the one hand who are thinking about the backbone of Internet two point zero, the quantum Internet. Obviously, in a world where RSA is crackable and that is no longer fantasy, we’re debating again the time line on that. The basis of e commerce, the basis of banking, the basis of battlefield communication is all something that is at the forefront of people’s concerns. I mean, right now on the battlefield, you’re seeing drones getting hacked and down and people are tethering them. And so the ability to communicate safe and securely, I think, is incredibly valuable to pretty much everyone in every industry.

IDQ is issuing business. It’s about twenty years old. It was a piece of SK Telecom. SK Telecom is becoming a roughly 1.5%, two % shareholder as a result of our stock based partnership and operating partnership with them. And they’re embedding the quantum random number generator chip that iQ makes in the Samsung Galaxy Quantum five also.

So there’s a pretty if you look at iQ’s website, there is four or five families of solutions and we’re involved in actually a fully broad range of let’s just say quantum data transmission as well as random number generation. We’d like to play a role not only, of course, in scaling our own quantum computers faster than everybody else, but providing that backbone around networking for three other agencies and governments and companies that want to have their own air gaps network and computing solution. Ultimately, we think that we’re going to need a big presence and in some cases partnerships to expand that presence for financial infrastructure, financial banking systems, payment systems, e commerce. It’s really hard to think about how the world is going to function if we can’t rely upon the ability to transmit information securely, right? So we will continue investing in our networking portfolio and our networking business because it’s simply not just a foundational item for national security, it’s a foundational item for the economy overall.

Joe Moore: Great. Any other questions from

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