$IONQ On Sunday, Fed Gov Today premiered "The Quantum Advantage: From Breakthrough Technology to Mission and Market Impact", presented by IonQ and recorded at Quantum World Congress in College Park, Maryland. The program opens with the money: the Energy Department will offer up to $215 million for quantum, and Commerce is spreading $2 billion across nine companies. The message of the next 27 minutes is clear. Quantum is going mainstream, and it has become a national race. @NiccoloDeMasi sets the frame: "the 21st century, I believe, is going to be determined with regards to economic growth and national security through the lens of quantum technologies." For him, this is "the geopolitical race that matters most for our generation." After the CPU and GPU eras comes the QPU era, and IonQ wants to lead it as a full stack company, from computing to networking, security and sensing. "We make our own chips. We make our own machines right here in College Park, Maryland." Since July 31, IonQ also owns SkyWater, a US semiconductor foundry. The machines are "kind of the size of a commercial refrigerator": not on your desk yet, but in the basement of your building. Laptops, phones and tablets will call a quantum computer for problems they cannot solve otherwise. With NVIDIA (announced Sept. 23, a Superion 256 planned at NVIDIA's Accelerated Quantum Research Center in 2027), "the warfighter will have tremendously more computing power at their hands." And beyond computing, IonQ is building GPS that "should be about 1,000 times more accurate", from meters down to millimeters. Then the mission. Robert Cardillo, former NGA director and Executive Chairman of IonQ Federal: "There's no silver medal here." Yet winning the race is not the goal in itself: "The mission is national security." His role is "to transition the science into reality." He sees "that American virtuous cycle": a public university, trapped-ion research, private capital, an IPO and a state partnership. "What we really just need is the demand signal." His message: "Give us those challenges. Let us compete. We're ready." On Oct. 7, DARPA moved IonQ to Stage C of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (up to $300M). Governor Wes Moore explains the $1B Capital of Quantum initiative, with IonQ as anchor partner, in the state that is home to US Cyber Command, the NSA, the Applied Physics Lab and the University of Maryland. Quantum becomes "not a lane, but a lens". IonQ is "the first publicly traded pure quantum play", and backing it is "a larger investment in the national security of the United States." Cyber is the other side of the coin. Niccolo warns about "bad guys that are going to use the latest and greatest LLMs, plus at some point they'll get quantum computers". And GAO found that none of the 24 major federal agencies it reviewed had tested post-quantum cryptography in its own environment. That is why IonQ does quantum security too, not just computing. On Monday, IonQ announced the acquisition of Elisity, adding identity-based Zero Trust protection to its quantum-safe networking and security stack. The last piece is people. Gretchen Campbell (UMD) says you need researchers, engineers, startups and early customers, and the federal government will be one of those early customers. The workforce must grow "by an order of magnitude", from a base of "maybe 10,000 people". In a field that small, talent is a real edge, and IonQ is building it: born at UMD, it started QLab with the university, now open to researchers, industry and agencies, and it trains customers on site. Masako Yamada describes work with Synopsys on computational fluid dynamics and a one-year EPB Fellows program in Chattanooga, then concludes: "no matter what job you have now, there's a place for you in quantum." My takeaway as a shareholder: science, chips, hybrid computing, sensing, mission and talent all point in the same direction. As Niccolo puts it, IonQ is "still the largest and first public quantum company in history", and the QPU era "is what IonQ is leading." The full program is worth 27 minutes. youtube.com/watch?v=q3Zt7_iO… #IonQ #QuantumComputing #NationalSecurity

$IONQ Intel's CEO: mass-producing quantum computers takes a good fab. He adds that it is too early to know which approach will work. IonQ's fab covers both halves. SkyWater builds IonQ's ion-trap chips and, since September 8, sells superconducting and photonics processes to the rest of the industry. Whichever approach, its wafers can come out of the same Minnesota fab. What Investor Day put on screen: → 12 times as many wafer lots every six months as IonQ's old ion-trap fabs → Chris Ballance: more ion-trap chips built in the previous six months than in IonQ's whole history before that → Tom Sonderman: today SkyWater is the only quantum foundry → Qolab, co-founded by Nobel laureate John Martinis, is already on the superconducting line Mihir Bhaskar, who runs the foundry business, put the timing plainly this month: quantum companies need "wafers in 2027, not a facility that comes online at the end of the decade." Full interview on QuantumJane: youtu.be/MwxUkWty6ao?t=666 #IonQ #Quantum