All right. Thanks everybody for making it. I'm Troy Jensen. I'm one of the analysts at Cantor. I follow the quantum computing space. Luckily, it's gonna be a good year for a good decade, right, for the quantum sector. Luckily enough to have Inder Singh CFO, COO of IonQ. I know Inder's got a few slides he wants to go through first, and then I'll get some queued up questions. If anybody has questions in the audience, just raise your hand, try to get my attention, we'll definitely open it up for Q&A.
It might be hard to see anybody with these bright lights.
I know, right?
Yeah. Thanks everybody for joining us today. It's great to be with you. Thank you, Troy, for having us here at the company at your event. Our company is, of course, a close follower of your points of view and what you put out there in terms of what the future holds. I thought I'd just share a few slides for those of you who don't know the company to explain the company, 'cause it's changed dramatically from what it was just a year ago. I've been with the company now formally for about two quarters. I was on the board of directors of the company when it first went public back in 2021.
I was CFO of Arm, and we were working on the sale of that company at that time. This slide that I wanted to share with you is only three slides, I promise. One of them just sets the, I'll call it sort of baseline for where we are today versus where we were a year ago, and frankly, where most of the industry still is. This slide shows you on the bottom left-hand corner, quantum computing. If you follow quantum, you'll first come across computing, of course. Most of the companies that are trying to create a computer or have one, or are deploying one are in that bottom left-hand tile on this page. That's the industry TAM, if you will, that we were part of also one year ago.
We had built, at that time, the fourth generation quantum computer, and we're deploying it. We have now built the fifth generation quantum computer. Later this year, we'll be finalizing our sixth generation quantum computer for next year, customer deployments. Seventh generation will be on the books already later this year, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of innovation for us in the bottom left-hand corner of this page alone. A very large market, a vibrant market, lots of companies, some private, some public, some about to go public.
We are innovators in that area in a way where we think we have a sustainable advantage and a roadmap that goes out five years, which we intend to execute to, which will keep our machines in the leading edge of what the world has to offer in terms of quantum computing capability. We appointed our new CEO, Niccolo de Masi, at the beginning of last year. As he took the helm, he took the company that had succeeded in that first quadrant already and started expanding it to the right and creating basically the first and only so far quantum platform company that now has the other elements of what you see.
Quantum networking is about connecting quantum computers to each other, whether it's our quantum computer to someone else's or ours to ours, but building the connectivity that, for example, a Cisco built in its early days as well. Quantum cybersecurity was a reflection on the fact that quantum machines, as they become more capable, will be doing things that I think will start to threaten traditional cybersecurity. We will need, the world will need quantum cybersecurity at that point in time. That future state is getting closer and closer. We acquired a company in Switzerland that is the number two company in the world in quantum key distribution and started announcing, as you've seen in the last 12 months, a number of wins with customers around the world.
Quantum sensing reflects on the fact that if you are building quantum solutions, they need to be in space as well because quantum solutions that are deployed by other countries, in some cases adversaries, are jam-proof. GPS can be jammed. Quantum offers an opportunity to have something that is either impossible or very, very difficult to interfere with. Quantum in Space gives you the platform to actually deploy some of those solutions in space. We are still at our heart a quantum computing company, of course, but we can now bring together solutions for different kinds of customers, and I'll show you in a minute what sort of applications that take advantage of the entire platform. This just shows you some of the key things that happened over the course of the last year.
Some of the customer names up on top there, partners that we've worked with together. Our CEO is shown here as well. Year after year, and I've watched it from the board for the first four years and then from the company for the last two quarters at least, we continue to execute on what we say and have the balance sheet that we need behind us to be able to invest for the long term and not worry about where the next investment dollar is gonna be coming from. A very strong cash position, no debt. My philosophy is always have, like, multi-year financial firepower to be able to do anything that you need to do for your customers, frankly, and then for your shareholders, of course.
I often get the question around, okay, so what are these being used for? What we wanted to do was just demonstrate to you and show you on one page, candidly, all the different kinds of applications that exist today. Some of these we build ourselves and we'll continue building ourselves. Some of them, we do it in partnership with our customers. You see the use cases in the middle, around life sciences, around energy, logistics, finance, cybersecurity. There are about seven areas we're gonna focus on ourselves as a company. In addition to building the quantum computers that power the future of quantum, we're building the applications that run on top. It's nice to have the iPhone. It's better to have the App Store with it. It's nice to have the iPod.
It's nice to have the music store with it. We're making sure that at every generation of the computing journey, that we are building the applications that are most needed and then allow others to build on top, of course, as well. The customers that you see there are names of customers that we've announced. There are many that we haven't announced that we're working with as well, of course, and then applications we can't announce yet. We are building the roadmap for all things quantum, whether it's on the ground in terms of computing, in space in terms of sensing, under the water in terms of helping underwater vehicles navigate more effectively, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those are the three slides I thought I would share.
We can have a dialogue if that makes sense.
Perfect. All right. I'm gonna start with a quick, audience participation question. Who in the audience thinks quantum will be commercialized in the next three years? How about five years? Inder, you don't believe it? I didn't see your hand go up.
Well, you know, I voted with my career decision.
Right.
You know, I was happy being on the board of this company and watching it flourish, actually, over the last four years, become a market leader, the market leader, and then watching it do these things that are up on the slide.
Yep.
These are things happening today. These aren't like five years from now. These are things today. Five years from now, there'll be a much, much longer list, I think, of what this technology can do, right? I joined when I was at Arm, having sold Arm to NVIDIA, by the way. That transaction obviously didn't go through. Then we announced the IPO of Arm. To me, this was the future of computing, and that's why I joined this company.
Yeah
As it were.
I'm a big believer too, within the next couple of years, we will see applications and problems getting solved with, you know, quantum, maybe hybrid networks or hybrid kinda computers.
Yep
to solve them. What I'm getting to is if we're that close, why is post-quantum security not, like, accelerating right now? If you're a bank or, you know, any type of government agencies, you have to be worried about, you know, quantum cracking your security systems.
Yes, I think it's happening already, right? I think it started with outside the U.S. initially, to be candid, and with countries starting to sort of batten down the hatches, realizing that at some point, encryption, which underlies all things that we know, can be broken. You don't have to, like, break everything instantly, but you start chipping away at the different RSA protocols or the ECC protocols, which is not hard to do. You know, it's getting closer. It's not like 20 years away, which everyone thought. I think I would encourage everyone to put like a $0.01 notification on your bank accounts as well. We're starting to see financial institutions get ready for it. We're starting to see governments get ready for it.
We're starting to see more and more commercial customers realize that if their business model depends on anything digital, they want to be protected now. There are a few flavors of quantum cybersecurity that people can choose, and we offer it all. You know, one of the advantages that I think IonQ has established is we'll meet you where you are if you're a customer. So if you want PQC, we're there for you. If you want QKD and really want to have physical security that is very difficult for even future sort of quantum computers to break, we can deliver that now. I think more and more people realize you need application-level software security and hardware security at the same time.
Yep. I'm gonna go back to your slide. This one right here. When I think about kinda this, the cycles of deployment of your platform, I mean, I think the systems to me are, you know, 3-5 years out, just there's a lot of development needs. Can you talk about, do you expect to see inflection in other areas of the business first? Like we talked about post-quantum security or like atomic sensors. To me, atomic clocks and sensors make a ton of sense right now. We don't have to wait for development. Do you see different parts of your business inflecting at different rates?
Yeah. I mean, look, when I see this chart, I remember my days at Cisco Systems, where we became sort of the one-stop shop for all things networking. We were agnostic. We were willing to connect anything to anything. That's what this company is doing at the same time as well. You'll see that at any point in time, any one of these levers that we have, product families, if you will, can be firing and others can be firing as well. It gives you the ability to leverage different revenue streams, of course, but also it gives you different entry points. In some cases, our customers may want the network before they want the computer, and that there's been cases of that.
In other cases, they buy the computer first and they say, "Well, what good is this if it doesn't connect to anything? Help us do that." This morning, we announced an investment with University of Cambridge, actually-
Oh, really?
which involves a quantum computer and a network connecting two rival universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which I thought would never be bridged, but they are. More and more, we're starting to see people starting maybe with cybersecurity, to your point, and saying, "If that's gonna be broken first, I want that," and then wanting the network as well.
Yep.
You know, look, I think the quantum computer heritage that we have and future roadmap that we have that we're executing to is without compare, absolutely without compare. The 100-qubit machine that is being deployed this year, the 256-qubit machine being deployed next year, the 10,000 machine after that, the 20,000 after that, and so on, that roadmap is unmatched. It becomes a question of execution and leveraging a semiconductor ecosystem, which we're doing more and more of.
Yep. All right, since you brought it up, I did wanna talk a little bit about Oxford Ionics and that product roadmap or the roadmap, the technical milestones you expect to hit. Oxford Ionics is at what qubit count now? Is it-
Well, yeah, 256 is going to be our first Oxford Ionics-based system.
That comes out when exactly?
It's in development right now. The chip is gone through. I said on the earnings call, tape outs A, B, and C. D is going well. Customer deployment should begin. The CEO of that business will tell me early next year. I think it can be done perhaps even sooner, but yes.
This is your confidence on the roadmap for a company that's at 256 qubits today to talk publicly about 200,000 and higher and the conviction that you guys have on hitting that roadmap.
Yeah. I think it's a big step function change from where we were two years ago and frankly, where a lot of other quantum companies that are trying to do trapped ion still are, which is using lasers to control the ions. You can imagine that as you use more ions, you need more lasers. The more powerful the machine, the bigger the machine, potentially, the more energy consumption, et cetera. With Oxford Ionics, we're able to switch to electronic control of trapped ions rather than lasers for doing that. That allows us to use an ecosystem that already exists. Foundries that already exist, a chiplet strategy for starting with one chip and scaling it up that already exists, but use it in a quantum sense.
That's what gives us the confidence to go from the 100 we are at today, the 256 that we're gonna be delivering and the 10,000 beyond.
Yep. Okay, perfect. How about just a little bit more on how about networking? Right. When I think you guys, I guess from my Cisco legacy, I think about switches and routers. Is it gonna be different equipment? How come the existing networking guys aren't talking about this yet?
Well, you know, look, I think we're happy to be the evangelist of it. You know, my former company, Cisco, is waking up to it as well, as you can imagine. It's an opportunity that people maybe didn't think about a year ago and are thinking about it now. Some of our customers actually wanted the quantum network first, but to use it over existing fiber or dark fiber, high quality fiber, but light it up and then set up a quantum communications network. We did that. More and more, we're seeing people starting with computing and saying, "Okay, I wanna connect it to things." As I said, we will meet the customer where they are.
Across Europe, we've announced at least three deployments already of networking and in some cases, networking with post-quantum cybersecurity.
Perfect. Okay. One thing I forgot to say on the Oxford Ionics, I know that was part of the, like a short thesis on you guys, right? To me, I think what you said was so critical, you guys were previously trying to control the qubits with lasers, and that's extremely hard to scale, correct? Moving to more of an electronic approach is gonna provide better scalability for you guys. The Oxford Ionics is actually, to me, more of a catalyst, a positive, not as much a negative.
Well, I mean, I’m not sure what the short case. I mean, for me, sort of like this industry was nascent and didn’t exist when I joined the board of this company, candidly. 4 years later, we have the world’s largest quantum computing company is this company. The guidance we’ve given for this year has a midpoint of $235 million. You know, the upper end is almost a quarter of a billion dollars, rounds two, whereas it was like less than $2 million four years ago. The numbers speak for themselves. Once you start having repeat wins, once you start having a customer say, “Okay, I own your fourth generation.”
I want your 5th generation computer, and by the way, I want access to your 6th generation when it's ready," that's the flywheel effect that Cisco probably experienced 25 years ago, 30 years ago, early days, right? I think you start to see a customer that buys your roadmap on computing and then says, "I want the other things as well." Having, like, dozens of products instead of one product. Like in that bottom left-hand corner, we had a product, a product with a great trajectory, but a product. When you have the rest of this, you can now build a solution. To your point earlier, sensing is a solution. Having a sensor alone isn't enough.
Having a platform to put the sensor into, having the atomic clock that's considered the most accurate in the world to add to that's what creates a solution for a, let's call it national security customer.
Yep. Yeah, perfect. All right, now IonQ's consistently argued that trapped ions offer superior fidelity and connectivity compared to, you know, superconducting approaches, probably most approaches. From a scaling perspective, how confident are you that that architecture will remain competitive as these systems move towards fully fault-tolerant?
Yeah. We feel very confident with the decision made, I guess, 30 years ago by the original founders of the company, right? Whether lucky or smart or some combination thereof, they picked a modality that doesn't require that you cool things down to, like, absolute zero, at which point, like, everything stops moving, so you have to go just a notch above that. Maintaining, I'm not knocking any technology, mind you, but, like, maintaining absolute zero degrees Kelvin or, like, less than 0.2 degrees Kelvin is hard. Creating material that operates like a circuit at that temperature is hard. Scaling that is hard. It's kinda like the laser thing I was talking about.
Yeah.
The more powerful the superconducting thing becomes over time, the more cooling it needs, the more difficult it is to maintain in that steady state, the harder it is to connect any to any qubit to each other. There are a number of things that I'm not saying can't be overcome over time. Sure, they can be probably. If trapped ion gets you there first, and it's cheaper by orders of magnitude, then I think you start to see customers choosing actually.
Right. Yep. Yeah, just for the audience, so there's kind of two technologies, photonics and trapped ions, that you don't need refrigeration, I guess maybe neutral atoms too. Superconducting, you need these dilution refrigerators that are, like, millions of dollars. You know, arguably, if trapped ions can scale, it'll be a much cheaper solution than superconducting from the grand scheme of things. I guess a question for you, do you think we're headed towards one dominant architecture technology? Are there gonna be, you know, heterogeneous ecosystems or hybrid deployments or?
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm an engineer also, so I believe many can coexist over time. Frankly, a few, one or two maybe, become most relevant over time, right? I think I'm not gonna try to say which ones they are. I think trapped ion for sure is one of them. Whether the other one is photonic or superconducting or something else really just depends. A lot of quantum depends still on science and scientific breakthroughs. With trapped ion, for us at least, those are behind us. Starting with a natural advantage of having few errors to correct, higher fidelity, longer coherence times, gives you the ability to get to fault-tolerant computing more easily. I think that's the holy grail for this industry, is to get to fault-tolerant computing.
We announced recently that we've achieved four nines fidelity, which is, like, the last thing that we needed to have, candidly. Oxford Ionics helped us get that, of course.
Mm-hmm.
Now we're leveraging Oxford Ionics' roadmap to actually scale the machine to logical qubits. You know, you can pound your chest and say we have millions of qubits one day, et cetera, et cetera. That's great.
Right.
If you're using, like, 99% for error correction and, like, 1% are actually usable, that's not that helpful. In our case, we're starting with fewer errors to correct, and therefore it's a question of now just scaling the machine to get the logical qubits.
Yep. Ions are natural, right? They're more pure, right?
Bingo.
The fidelity is better-
Bingo
using ions, so.
Yeah.
All right. Can we talk about your software strategy, right? I mean, you guys have tons of hardware. Obviously, there's software embedded, but, like, compiler applications. Do you have a platform approach to the software side of it?
Yeah, it's a great question, and I think this again, you know. This is one of the smallest companies, actually the smallest company I've been part of directly. Most of them have been very large companies that know how to do this at scale. What we're doing is making sure this company also establishes that scale. One thing that you need is software scale, to your point. The ability to have compilers that work with the machines that you create at the same time. For IonQ, what I watched from the board at least was four years, four generations of creating compilers that work with each successive generation of quantum computer. With the acquisition of Oxford Ionics, we get the chip expertise, and then we use our compiler experts who've built this over time already, combined with that team to go execute on the overall solution.
The solution of a quantum computer involves software that manages the machine itself. Compiler is part of that, so we have that at scale. It involves physicists who understand how to make this work and to integrate the system together. Involves, importantly, applications developers. Almost no other company that I've seen is even talking about the applications themselves. We are not just talking about it. We have, I think, one of the world's largest, if not largest, applications development teams. The machine and the application that runs on it, like the ones you saw, that's the capability we're building right now. We will scale that, and, you know, having more than $3 billion of cash allows us to have comfort to be able to scale the software expertise just as much as the hardware.
Yep. Okay. For IonQ, is the focus for you guys really on the U.S. government and their allies? 'Cause I know there's a lot of talk about U.S. supply chain. You look at, you know, your acquisition history. Is that the focus of you guys? Would be this U.S. supply chain selling to U.S. administration and our allies?
Look, I think we've rapidly become a very global company. I mean, of course we love our U.S. customers and value them over time. On the earnings call, I mentioned that more than 30% of our revenues are actually outside the United States now. 60% are non-government, as of last year. You know, as we think about further investment, yes, as you develop machines that become more capable and more powerful, governments start to take notice.
Right.
That's where four years ago, it was, like, mainly labs looking at things. Even three years ago, it probably labs looking at things. For us now, it's starting to be what you were saying at the very beginning, which is actually deployment at scale. What I'm, the trend I'm starting to see, customers that we're starting to see, is data center operators that actually are saying, "We have the GPUs. We love those. We need a QPU next to them to do different types of things that GPUs just can't do.
Yep.
That's when you start to get, again, this adoption effect happening. You know, will the U.S. government be an important customer? Of course. Will they want us to help sell similar solutions to allies? Of course. But that's an and. What I'm seeing right now is, like, financial services institutions and others say, "We need to look at the ability for what quantum can do." We're starting to see life sciences companies say, "Help us with drug discovery. How can we do that earlier?" We're starting to see some early attempts at trying to understand protein folding, and which we demonstrated last year. Great applications outside of government, great applications out of-
Yeah
...outside of what you would normally think.
Yeah, exactly. That's a good point. A lot of commercial applications. I do think those will happen first. Let me just see. Is there any questions in the audience? If I can see hands. All right. Right here.
Inder, good to see you.
Great to see you again. Thanks for being here.
Just to clarify, how will you use strategy to overcome both philosophy compares to what IBM?
Yeah, look, I think I'm not gonna compare and contrast. They're very, very different companies, right? I think I respect IBM for everything they've done over the past decades, and they will do in the future decades. Putting aside kind of what their strategy may or may not be, this is a pure play quantum company. For us, like, this isn't, you know, quantum isn't in our other category of revenue. This is, like, our revenue. What we're trying to do is make sure that we have the strongest ability to invest in a five-year roadmap of technology solutions. Others will be in the market also. That's what makes a market.
One really good thing about this industry, and it's very different than any other industry I've been in prior to this, which is in other technologies, you're trying to displace somebody else. You know, at Cisco, we were trying to win against Ericsson and Lucent and Nortel and did. It's hard because you're dislodging an incumbent, and they don't wanna be dislodged usually, right? In quantum, there isn't an incumbent. Like, people ask me, like, you think about your competition. No, not really. They actually use components from us in some cases. I'm not naming anyone. We make components that other quantum companies use today. It's in our interest for the industry to actually grow. It's not a zero-sum game. We're not taking food out of somebody else's mouth. This is about creating a capability that simply doesn't exist.
You know, the more companies that succeed at it, the higher the odds that this becomes an industry at scale itself, but we're not standing still, right? On this slide, you see at the very bottom the quantum application layer. That's really important. Having all the products is important, having the software, the hardware integration expertise, the best physicists in the world, and even creating the ecosystem by investing in some universities that will create graduates of quantum that don't exist today in some cases, right? Having all of that knowledge base, having an ecosystem is important. Applications are very, very important. You have to have not just, like, proof of concept things, but application development at scale. Imagine, like, a quantum hedge fund one day against a classical machine.
Which one do you think you'll bet for, or against, right? I think I know which one I would bet in favor of, right? Those are the types of things we wanna build the cutting edge applications that simply don't exist.
Any other questions? All right, how about one more for you here. When investors look at IonQ over the next five years, what are the two to three milestones that will define whether your company has truly been successful?
Well, I think that to me, putting up the numbers, right? Showing the revenue row, showing the repeat customer, showing the adoption, showing the globalization, showing the entire solution. It's nice to have a machine. It's much better to have, like, a roadmap. Most technology customers lock into a roadmap. Any company that has a roadmap that says, "I'm gonna sell you this today, this next year, this two years from now, this four years from now," you have to execute, of course, right?
Now customers can lock in and say, "Okay, so how easy will you make it for me if I commit to be with you on a journey?" I think what we have to do now is keep executing on that roadmap that I talked about, the roadmap in quantum computing, the roadmap in networking, the roadmap in sensing, and not just be a one-trick pony. Super important for this company to execute that, and you're starting to see that flow through our P&L. You're starting to hopefully see that in the confidence in which we describe our business. Because our customers are not labs only anymore, we can actually see it being deployed in the real world. The second thing I think is establishing scale within the company, the ability to, yes, acquire some things, but quickly integrate them.
Right.
Like, two quarters ago, I mentioned that was gonna be a focus for us. I reported recently that we have now successfully integrated the things that we acquired, at least from a, you know, sort of the common denominator standpoint, and then the engineering integration begins after that to create those solutions. I think those two things we have to execute on for sure. It's also an industry in which we have to maintain very sharp focus, and it's a technology that can do amazingly powerful good things and amazingly powerful not so good things, just like AI. We have to be very conscious of how we balance for our customers, protecting against the inevitable misuses of technology versus just the uses of it-
Yep.
you know, having quantum cybersecurity today is one way for us to show that responsibility.
I'm glad you brought up the integration comment 'cause to me, I've seen companies struggle doing one acquisition. You guys have done about eight now or so, right? Glad to hear you guys are focused on the integration. How about just to end it, we got 30 seconds left, when do you think IonQ will crack encryption codes, if you had to put a timeline on that?
Well, the only thing I can say publicly is what the Department of Defense has said themselves, which is they expect it to happen in less than three years. It ain't 20 years away.
Right
For sure. As these machines become in logical qubits, useful qubits, much more powerful, and this is public, like Shor's Algorithm takes 4,000-ish ± qubits for RSA-2048.
Okay.
You can look at our roadmap and do your own math on how many years away that might be.
Okay. 4,000 logical to crack-
Well, that's, you know, you can Google it, and you'll see that that's roughly what it is, plus or minus.
Yeah. Gotcha.
Right? It, you know, like you do it in rapidity or you do it over a year, that makes a difference of course. We think as these machines become more powerful, and you have quantum cybersecurity or regular cybersecurity companies here, so I wanna be respectful for everyone. Like, I think you need to have an awareness that, encryption is at risk.
Yep. Awesome. We're out of time, Inder Singh. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Appreciate you coming.