Corporate research and commercial division
Appears in 3 stories
Scaling superconducting quantum systems
Quantum computers can already outperform classical supercomputers on specific tasks, as Google's Willow chip demonstrated when it solved in five minutes a problem that would take the fastest machines 10 septillion years. The breakthrough, announced in October 2025, marks the first verifiable quantum advantage, achieved with Google's Quantum Echoes algorithm, which is 13,000 times faster than supercomputers. But scaling from 100-qubit systems to the million-qubit machines needed for real-world applications requires control hardware that doesn't exist, and current laser systems are tabletop-sized, power-hungry, and impossible to replicate thousands of times over.
Updated May 16
Targeting million-qubit systems by 2030
Quantum computers promise to revolutionize drug discovery, cryptography, and materials science—but only if they can scale from today's dozens of qubits to millions. The bottleneck isn't the qubits themselves; it's the massive control systems: each qubit needs laser beams precisely controlled by bulky modulators, and thousands of cables snaking from room temperature into refrigerators colder than deep space. A lab rack that controls 100 qubits would need an entire data center to control a million.
Incumbent with the most extensive published roadmap to fault tolerance
Quantum computing has spent four decades as a physics experiment with a marketing team. On May 6, 2026, IonQ reported $50 million in quarterly revenue — up roughly 556% from a year earlier — and reaffirmed full-year guidance of $225 to $245 million, putting one of the field's leading pure-play companies on track for a quarter-billion-dollar year.
Updated May 6
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