At a joint economic committee hearing on emerging technologies, IonQ CEO Niccolo De MasI testifies on the future of quantum computing, what it means today, and how it could reshape society tomorrow. Watch his full testimony right here.
I am Niccolo De MasI, chairman and CEO of NYSE-listed IonQ.
IonQ's founders created the entire category of quantum computing 30 years ago with a famous empirical demonstration and associated 1995 publication.
IonQ has been building ever since and today is based in College Park, Maryland. IonQ is the largest publicly listed quantum company in history by any measure: patents, revenue, PhDs, balance sheet, and market capitalization.
I'd like to make three main points this afternoon. First, that IonQ's quantum computers are operating on both sides of the Atlantic and rapidly commercializing globally. Second, that quantum technology is transformational and will become a core economic engine and job creator. And third, that quantum computing is vital to and advances our national security interests and we must invest to ensure we beat China.
Quantum computing is the most profound technological shift of the 21st century and is the final frontier of the computing revolution that began 80 years ago. While classical computers process information in series, quantum computers evaluate solution possibilities in parallel. IonQ will soon be able to solve a wide variety of highly complex problems that would take the most powerful classical computers millions of years to resolve.
IonQ quantum computers are already changing approaches to material science, drug discovery, logistics, financial services, supply chain, predictive maintenance, defense and intelligence, and secure communications. We are the fuel of innovation and are poised to positively accelerate every aspect of applied science as well as amplifying artificial intelligence. IonQ's technology will ultimately save lives by supporting rapid advances in areas such as cancer research and disaster prediction.
At IonQ, we're building our fifth generation of machines which are 260 million times more powerful than our fourth generation. This tremendous speed up in a single generation is a hallmark of IonQ's quantum computing technology which is inflecting powerfully in the mid-2020s.
Partnering with AstraZeneca, Amazon Web Services and Nvidia, IonQ announced this past June a 20x speedup in computational drug design. This turns nearly a month of classical computational work into just a day and a half and was achieved on our fourth generation machine. It won't be long before we can turn a year of classical computational work into just a day.
Analysts estimate that by the mid-2030s, the economic impact of quantum technologies will be in the trillions of dollars, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. Governments around the world are investing tens of billions of dollars in national quantum strategies, and the White House has designated quantum a core national R&D priority. Nations moving first as technology leaps forward build long-lasting competitive advantages.
IonQ has spent over $4.5 billion thus far building our company and considers itself a key partner for our nation and our race to prevail against the PRC.
IonQ quantum computers use vastly less energy and space than classical supercomputers. Simulating our upcoming 256-qubit system fully using a classical GPU is estimated to require 1 billion terawatts of energy. Planet Earth presently only generates one terawatt per year. This strategic efficiency attracts investment as we have demonstrated by raising $3 billion between July and October this year.
IonQ is also the only company in history to have created a complete quantum platform that connects quantum computing with quantum networking, quantum cybersecurity, and quantum sensing. Our quantum sensors have created next-generation positioning, navigation, and timing solutions, which allow for next-generation GPS to be 1,000 times more accurate. Our quantum networks allow distributed quantum computing and the unhackable transfer of information.
Quantum is no longer speculative. It forms the backbone of the next generation of computing and security infrastructure. The combination of quantum and AI is a once-in-a-century opportunity to accelerate productivity growth, industrial competitiveness, scientific progress, and economic resilience. If we act decisively, we can ensure that our nation leads and the supermajority of value accrues first and foremost in the United States.
Could you comment on the investment landscape and projected growth of quantum computing? And in particular, I'm interested in how the United States compares to China and the rest of the world in number of startups, patents granted, capital and scientific publications. What's the mark-to-market on where we are relative to the rest of the world and who's growing or who's accelerating?
Thank you for that question. Well, we're fortunate in this country that the world's largest quantum company is IonQ and it's obviously based here in College Park. So, we've been at it 30 years. We've been building for 30 years and private capital markets in the United States have of course built on some of the start that we got with government support a few decades ago. And private capital tends to find good ideas. And so we have seen a tremendous, you know, of course, interest on both sides of the Atlantic for companies such as IonQ.
And I think that there are, you know, I call them slow followers, but there are also-rans in our sector of course who are trying to compete with IonQ in the private markets and are smaller than us and behind us both temporally and by any other measure, unit economics, revenue, etc.
You know, with China, we've had problems, honestly, with theft. That has impacted us. We have an office in Oxford, England. Our headquarters is here, College Park, Maryland. There have been thumb drives that go into servers at 3 a.m. and people leave the country kind of thing. So, I of course ask for your help on that topic because it's not a symmetric playing field.
You know, China has invested heavily in state-sponsored initiatives. We believe that we have a five-year lead over them presently, IonQ does, but specifically because the US, this administration, has supported not just growth in our company but also combinatory progress. So we acquired a company in Oxford, England called Oxford Ionics that we announced at the technology prosperity deal signing in September and that was obviously very important for catalyzing success for us.
And so I think, look, the strength of course of our system is that it's not top-down, at the same time it remains very competitive.
How we can make sure that our younger generation, which is really probably much better than we are in some ways, but in some ways is not because they really rely so much on technology, have proper skills that AI actually improves productivity, not, you know, not actually becoming something that replaces and they become not capable to do something. Maybe you can both add something to that.
Sure, I'll take a crack at that. I'm in the quantum computing business and quantum computing, you know, we should think about as really the final frontier of the computing revolution that's been going for 80 years. We're an applied science company fundamentally. So I always like to say that we're not focused on helping kids cheat on their homework, right? And so, you know, we're focused on solving unsolvable problems for classical GPUs.
And so, the great thing about our company and industry is everything we're doing is creating jobs. There are no jobs today applied against problems that take a century to solve with a GPU data center or take a billion years with a GPU data center. And so every time we advance our machines, we're making these problems accessible and we're creating new industries.
The government, you know, this administration's done a fantastic job of obviously creating an environment for IonQ to flourish. We were a venture-backed company before we were public and so obviously we're big believers in the free market and price mechanisms that, you know, if you have something compelling, capital flows.
To answer your question on education, you know, I'm a physicist originally and I can remember when I went to Cambridge University how much quantum mechanics was on the curriculum in the 90s versus the complete lack of it in prior generations in the 60s, 70s. There's a lot of quantum that has correctly made its way into high schools, even maybe middle schools, and certainly undergraduate courses around the world.
And so that free market mechanism is doing a good job of getting people forward-looking in how they're learning and being trained. The last thing I will say is, you know, IonQ and the United States government at all levels, state, federal, local, has a tremendous opportunity to make us the standard effectively that wins. And we need to build the application software layer.
And so I would echo some of Mr. Reinhardt's comments around the depth that needs to come from specific applications, specific verticals, building those on our quantum computers gives us the greatest opportunity to create value, grow the economy, create jobs, and of course lead the world.
I have, as I'm working on restarting the quantum initiative here in the Senate, what we're doing is looking at a sandbox. And Senator Lujan and I are doing this, which would be a sandbox for near-term applications and being able to turn these around in 18-24 months. I'd like for you to talk a little bit about why this is important for innovators to have access to this.
Well, thank you, Senator, for your foresight, wisdom, and leadership on so many quantum bills, both at the federal level and of course in the great state of Tennessee. We're proud of our partnership with Electric Power Board of Tennessee in Chattanooga. And this is, of course, a bit of the world that led not only in the world's broadest and fastest broadband capacity a decade ago, but is of course leading once again with quantum computers and quantum networks connected together.
The opportunity both at a state and federal level nationwide is to recognize where the ball is going, where the puck is going. And as you correctly identified, the opportunity for value capture is moving, we believe at the pace that IonQ is leading the quantum computing, networking, and sensing space, to very much be about software and applications and how you capture value and solving problems that can never be solved with classical computers using our quantum computers in partnership with the next generation of effectively software engineers who use that hardware to solve problems in record time that otherwise aren't part of the economy.
So, we're creating a brand new industry that will drive economic growth at the state and nationwide level. And it's being created effectively from scratch, right? There are currently no people, very few people who are able to build applications on our quantum computers.
And using our quantum computers and networks, you not only can perform calculations that will create, you know, pharma progress, financial services progress, supply chain progress, predictive maintenance progress, of course, defense and intelligence, and financial services progress, and ultimately you can do that and compute with our machines and also transmit that data and keep it unhackable and safe.
So this is the industry of the future. This is the industry that matters in the 21st century. We obviously need to continue to reauthorize everything we've depended on, you know, in prior years to get to where we are. I think there's a very, very brave future not just for the great state of Tennessee but also for our whole country if we continue to adopt quantum computing, quantum networking, sensing and realize that the game has now moved on to specific software applications in every single vertical that matters in every state and nationwide. And I think that that is so important as you look at those applications that are in development.
And of course you all have done some great work with Oak Ridge, which is there in Tennessee, and of course the Frontier, world's fastest computer, has been there in Oak Ridge, and we have a lot of innovation. And then you mentioned your partnership with Chattanooga. Talk for just a moment about why it is so important to have a partnership with one of our national labs and then partnerships like you have with EPB in Chattanooga and partnerships working on the Golden Dome, and why we have to have these emerging tech leaders step into those partnerships.
Yeah. Well, as you're undoubtedly aware, Under Secretary Gill at DOE and I were chatting about a week or two ago, you know, nine out of 10 dollars spent on R&D are coming from the private sector, but that one out of 10 is really important for sparking progress, particularly on early-stage projects. Our partnership with ORNL is deeply important in advancing both quantum computing and quantum networking in the great state of Tennessee, but also nationwide. And so the right partnership here is really what I think is creating the ecosystem for our success, honestly. And that's true both at the state level and the federal level.
When it comes to broader applications, you know, what makes IonQ a very unique company is we have this quantum platform: quantum computing, quantum networking, and quantum sensing in all four theaters. We're doing this on land with EPB and a quantum network. We're doing this also up in the heavens. And so Golden Dome is completely relevant to the way we see our mission to extend quantum key distribution, quantum security, and quantum computing in all theaters that matter to both the state and of course the federal government. And it really is the industry of the future, right? So this is where the jobs are going to be nationwide and at the state level.
Tell me how close we are. Is my future a quantum that actually operates much slower because I have to do all sorts of correction, or, you know, where are we at? Because I actually, to my vice chair, I actually went to New Hampshire in August to go see one of the projects they have there where they're trying to actually do, here's our setup and here's actually how we're dealing with noise. Where are you at?
Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. So IonQ has the world's most precise and high-fidelity physical qubits. We have four 9s of fidelity, 99.99%. That means we don't actually have a lot of errors to correct. And it's one of the reasons why for the last 30 years we've led our industry and we continue to lead our industry in every milestone you can imagine, from when our machines turned on in 2017, when they went in the public Google, Amazon, Microsoft cloud in 2020. We've been running applications and selling cloud access and systems the last five years and we've obviously expanded into other branches of the quantum ecosystem.
So quantum, from our perspective, is very much now and it's inflecting right now in the mid-2020s. It's possible to try and build a quantum computer in different ways. Everyone else has a considerable temporal lag to the path that we've been on as we started this category in 1995 with our founder. And everyone else also has a significantly poorer unit economic pathway they're on. So, you're going to see much more expensive machines much later than us, right?
When I think about job creation and where we are from that perspective, you know, quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, we've created this industry from scratch and it's just inflecting. And as I said a couple minutes ago, we're solving problems that cannot be solved with all the supercomputers in history combined.
