I've always made it my mission to shine a spotlight, not just on the companies that Wall Street wants to hear about, but the ones that you won't hear about. Which brings me to IonQ. That's one of the quantum computing plays that has dominated this market for the past year. You ask a lot of questions about it, and especially in the past few months, it's really gone well. I'd say the thing's up 476% over the past 12 months. After pulling back hard earlier this year, it's now up 145% from its March lows. I know you want that. I don't blame you, I would too. Now, I used to resist recommending highly speculative stocks like IonQ with no earnings, not much in the way of revenue. But in this market, anything with a good story has the potential to become a huge winner. And I work for you. So let's check in with Niccolo De Masi. He's the CEO of IonQ, to get a better understanding of why so many people are excited about this. Commissioner, welcome to Mad Money.
Honor and pleasure to be here, sir. Big fan.
Oh, thank you. Well, I've got to tell you, I first came across your company when Peter Chapman, who's your executive chairman, he spoke at GTC, and I think it had a real impact on Jensen Huang, who's the CEO of Nvidia. And but candidly, I asked him about it and he said, Jim, you've really got to study, study, study. And then you still may not understand it. We have a very candid relationship. So I know we can't ask everyone to study, study, study. But I want to give you the microphone. Just tell us why this technology is so exciting and where you fit in it.
Yeah. Well, look, I think we're the biggest player in the business of quantum, right? We are the 800-pound gorilla of both quantum computing and quantum networking. So we're in fact a fully-fledged quantum internet company. Right. So we're building the most powerful and most affordable quantum computers. We're also building the networks, nodes, repeaters to be able to communicate safely, not just safely in a classical world, but safely in a quantum world where quantum computers are going to crack RSA in the coming years. You know, we are racing China, we believe almost single-handedly for the Western world, if you will, to be the RSA cracker. And of course, when that happens, everybody's going to need our quantum networking equipment to make sure that the world as we know it and civilization as we know it goes on. You mentioned Jensen Huang and GTC. You know, we've actually been on two GTCs this year and they were both very impactful, right? So Peter did the one in March and we did one in Paris. And we've demonstrated quantum advantage now twice. The first time was with Ansys and Synopsys back in March. And then more recently it was in Paris where we announced the 20x speedup in partnership with Nvidia and Amazon Web Services. And no one can really say that a 20x speedup is not, you know, real quantum advantage. The era of what's called quantum supremacy is just around the corner. You know, it's coming in quarters and very low single-digit years. And that's getting people obviously pretty excited about the fact that we'll be able to do things to help every area of applied science, right from drug discovery to...
Let's take pharmaceuticals, okay. Now pharmaceuticals, right now we have a lot of pharmaceuticals that are meant to keep you alive for five months. There's a tremendous, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars spent to make it so that you can live for four or five months. Are you guys thinking about instead of maintenance, would you be doing cure? Or is there diseases that are really hard that people spend fortunes on and have no luck? You would address them? Where would you be in that vertical?
Yeah. So all the bits of computational analysis in this world, from engineering to drug discovery, we announced a protein folding partnership and success, you know, just a month or so ago. And so our machines are now on the verge of simulating molecules, you know, that are probably 30, 35 atoms, molecules long. And so we're doing things in the next year that classical computers will not be able to do to predict and also look at molecules through a quantum lens. Right, right. And so I think you're going to see a plethora of both chronic as well as, you know, critical, if you will, drug discovery breakthroughs. And it's just going to keep going from there. As our machines get more powerful, we'll be able to model ever bigger molecules, right? Same with material science.
But Jensen told me that in the end, with companies like you, he would still have to play a role. That he now is pro-quantum. But he said, look, Jim, Nvidia's going to be involved. If it's quantum, they need us. Why is that?
Yeah, I think we're the biggest reason, honestly, in the last six months, why Jensen has changed his perspective on the sector. We've demonstrated, you know, two partnerships with him where we've shown quantum advantage and we've shown that, yes, we're going to grow with him in the coming years, kind of like when GPUs, you know, were an earlier thing and we were growing with CPUs. There will be a day where quantum processing units, particularly ours, where we are an order of magnitude, if not two orders of magnitude cheaper than any other path to what's called a fully fault-tolerant machine in the coming years. And so we expect to take down more pieces of the total compute space, as our energy needs are lower than classical and our machines are cheaper than everybody else's in the space.
So how did the Defense Department discover you? How did the Air Force discover you?
