The View from Davos with IonQ’s CEO Niccolo de Masi
📅 Jan 20, 2026Six Five Media10 MIN3442 VIEWS21 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Quantum computing isn’t sci-fi. It is a present-day security, infrastructure, and competitiveness issue.
From Davos, Patrick Moorhead sits down with Niccolo de Masi, CEO of IonQ, to break down how quantum computing is moving out of academic labs and into the center of geopolitical and enterprise strategy. As fault-tolerant systems advance, timelines are compressing, pushing quantum security from an abstract risk into an immediate priority for governments, financial institutions, and global enterprises. Niccolo walks through how IonQ is building beyond compute into networking, sensing, and sec...
The 65 is on the road with a view from Davos. And you can see behind us, it is packed. Traffic, people, a lot of stuff going on. For those of you who might not be familiar with Davos, it really is the intersection of policy, technology, and quite frankly, we're going to have a lot of trade talks here as well. One of the key emerging technologies that probably will be the biggest shortly is quantum computing, and to discuss this I have the CEO of IonQ. How are you doing, my friend?
Well, aside from talking to you extensively, as frequently, and as long as we can for the true insights, look, I think it's a recognition of the fact that IonQ is the world's largest quantum company in history. And that's largest by any definition: people, PhDs, balance sheet, revenue, market cap. But also what we're doing, and I'm seeing recognition of this from certainly politicians and nation states, particularly the sovereign wealth actors, is a recognition that quantum security is coming with a fierce urgency, right? If quantum computing — and when I say quantum computing I mean IonQ's quantum computers — you know, we believe that we're uniquely positioned to be able to run full fault-tolerant algorithms by the end of the current Trump administration. And that means that things like Shor's algorithm could be run. And if you run Shor's algorithm, it means that all of a sudden the infrastructure for cybersecurity has to be upgraded. So banks, governments, Fortune 100 companies, quantum security is kind of on the tip of its tongue. And IonQ is uniquely providing the only quantum platform in history that is sensing, networking, security, and computing.
So you made a few announcements recently in Korea and also with Quantum Basel. Can you talk through what those are and maybe what those aren't, just to solidify it for our viewers?
Yeah, so IonQ has expanded dramatically in the past year. I went from being a board member for the last four or five years to being the chairman and CEO, and we've expanded the vision from computing to networking, sensing, security as a complete quantum platform, and we've expanded the geographic reach. Right. So there's, believe it or not, there's 30 offices now for IonQ, 15 meaningful ones that have, you know...
Yeah. But we have an office in Seoul. We have an office in Basel. And so you're seeing us expand geographically with our computers getting sold and our quantum networks being sold in tandem with the computers in places like Switzerland, in places like Slovenia even, and of course in Korea.
Masi, N. D. (2026, January 20). The View from Davos with IonQ’s CEO Niccolo de Masi [Interview transcript]. Six Five Media. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3025122/
MLA
Niccolo de Masi. "The View from Davos with IonQ’s CEO Niccolo de Masi." Six Five Media, 20 Jan. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3025122/.
BibTeX
@misc{masi2026_3025122,
author = {Niccolo de Masi},
title = {The View from Davos with IonQ’s CEO Niccolo de Masi},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Six Five Media. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jan},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3025122/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
