Artificial intelligence has dominated the technology conversation for years. Quantum computing has not, at least not yet. But it is moving fast. It promises to do things no computer can do today, and it threatens to break the encryption that guards much of the world’s data.
One of the companies at the front of that race is IonQ.
In an interview with Ticker Take, IonQ chief financial officer and chief operating officer Inder Singh walked through where the technology stands, and where his company fits in.
To understand the opportunity, and the risk, it helps to start with what makes quantum computing different.
A different kind of computing
A traditional computer reads information as bits, ones and zeros, and tends to work through a problem one path at a time.
A quantum computer uses qubits, which can be a one, a zero, or both at once. That lets it weigh many possibilities at the same time.
Singh uses a maze to explain it. “A classical computer will try to go after one path, dead end, another path, dead end,” he said. A quantum computer can “look at all of the possibilities at one time and pick the best one.”
He calls the result classical computing “on steroids.” He is also careful to say quantum will not replace traditional computers or AI. It works alongside them, taking on the problems they struggle with. More and more data centre operators, Singh said, now want a quantum processing unit, or QPU, sitting next to their existing systems.
What it could do
The case for quantum is less about raw speed and more about solving problems that are currently out of reach. IonQ has been working with large companies on exactly those kinds of problems.
With AstraZeneca, Singh said, the company showed it could speed up part of the drug discovery process roughly twenty times, and that was on an older machine. He sees a longer list ahead: new treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, better battery chemistry for electric vehicles, advances in materials science.
“There are things we can’t even imagine today that these computers will do in the future,” Singh said.
That promise helps explain why investors have crowded into quantum stocks, even though most of these companies are still early and largely unprofitable.
From a small team to a market leader
Part of quantum’s appeal to investors is timing. Several of its leading companies went public early in their lives, which is unusual. It is a little like the early days of the internet, when you could buy a young Amazon.
Singh joined IonQ’s board about five years ago. Back then, he said, it was “a wonderful CEO,” about thirty people, “and a dream.” Since then the company has built five generations of quantum computers, each more powerful than the last, and they now run at customer sites rather than sitting in a lab.
That has bought IonQ fast growth, and a seat at the table on where the technology goes next.
The power, and the risk
The same power that makes quantum exciting is what makes it dangerous, and the people building it know it. The clearest example is encryption.
“Break all kinds of encryption is one of the things that quantum computers are likely to do in the next few years,” Singh said.
Encryption protects almost everything online, from bank accounts to personal identities to the systems behind critical infrastructure. A powerful enough quantum computer could pick that lock. IonQ’s answer has been to build the defence as well as the machine. It acquired post-quantum security technology that Singh describes as “cybersecurity in the quantum world, which cannot be cracked even by a quantum computer.”
Singh spent part of his career at Cisco Systems, and he reaches for that comparison to describe the strategy. “You go to Cisco because they just make it all work together in the classical world,” he said, “and we make it all work together in the quantum world.”
The idea is to offer computing, networking and security together. Singh also likens it to the iPhone: the hardware matters, but much of the value lives in the software built on top. IonQ is building both, including applications meant to protect sensitive data and systems such as power grids.
Why the money is moving
Quantum has reached a turning point in part because the money has shown up, from customers and, increasingly, from governments. The United States, the United Kingdom and several countries in the Middle East have all moved to back their own quantum efforts, treating the technology as a national priority.
For IonQ, that demand is an opening, but chasing it is expensive. Singh points to the balance sheet, about US$3 billion in cash and no debt, which he says lets the company plan years out.
The roadmap is steep. Singh said IonQ aims to go from 256-qubit machines next year to 10,000 the year after, and eventually to systems with as many as two million qubits. To get there, it has shifted away from a laser-based design toward standard semiconductor manufacturing, and it recently agreed to buy chipmaker SkyWater Technology in a deal worth about US$1.8 billion, giving it more control over how its chips are made.
IonQ is not profitable, which is true across the sector and a frequent knock against it. Singh argues this is not the moment to worry about pennies. “This is the phase where you go for growth,” he said, with the goal of winning customers and becoming the default name in the field. “This is not the time to actually become cost conscious and try to save five cents here or five cents there.”
For investors, the message is plain: the profits sit in the future. But the demand is here now, and the order book is growing.
Where it goes from here
The milestone everyone is chasing is what Singh calls the “golden prize”: a computer powerful enough to catch and fix its own errors as it runs, known as fault tolerance. Today’s quantum machines still make mistakes, and there will be setbacks along the way. But reaching that point is widely viewed as the moment quantum truly arrives.
“We are trying to do something that’s never been done before in the history of mankind,” Singh said.
The takeaway
For years, quantum computing felt like a lab experiment, interesting but far from useful. That is changing. The machines are real, the money is flowing, and a handful of companies, IonQ among them, are out front.
If AI has been the defining technology story of the past few years, quantum could be the next chapter, taking on problems still beyond reach in medicine, manufacturing and the security of a connected world. For the winners, the payoff could redraw the technology landscape and create a new group of investment standouts.
Whether IonQ gets there will come down to execution. But the ambition, and the stakes, are now hard to ignore.
Jon Erlichman is a BNN Bloomberg contributor and the host of Ticker Take on YouTube.
