Joining me now, Niccolo De Masi, the CEO of IonQ, investor day today. It's great to speak with you.
Putting out a lot of news for investor day too. So, first maybe let's start with the fact that you've upped the full year guidance here.
Yeah, absolutely. Look, we have an unbroken track record of meeting and beating guidance since our IPO. So this is the fifth year of it. I think it's safe to say that we not only have a business with incredible tailwinds, but we also have built the leading quantum ecosystem. And when you have the largest and deepest ecosystem, not just in computing, but networking, security, sensing, and now with SkyWater closing about six weeks ago, we also have the leading quantum foundry. More and more of our customers are purchasing more than one product from us. More and more of our customers are even overseas. And that makes it easier, honestly, to be growing and beating numbers every quarter and every year. And so I very much expect that you'll continue to see that from us.
Yeah. When I think about quantum and IonQ's place, you know, in this ecosystem specifically, you're vertically integrated, horizontally integrated. What does SkyWater bring to the table that wasn't there before?
So SkyWater is a historic transaction for the entire, I would argue, global quantum ecosystem. They are the only quantum foundry in the United States that has been operating for the better part of a decade in the quantum space. They support a significant percentage, I would even say a large percentage, of the entire quantum ecosystem, including ourselves. Some of those customers have not been announced. Some of those customers cannot be announced, you know, and maybe top secret, so to speak. But at the same time, what's exciting about SkyWater is that not only, as you said, it broadens what we call our merchant supply function. So we already sell atomic clocks, photonic interconnects, and networking to other quantum companies. Now we're also able to sell, of course, chips to other quantum companies. At the same time, as you correctly identified, it's driving the first vertically integrated quantum company in history. So IonQ now is able to go from the whiteboard to a design of our systems all the way through the manufacturing delivery and to do it at incredible scale, right?
So the driving force of the SkyWater acquisition was the fact that vertical integration allows us to move things earlier on our roadmap, not just for the current generation, the next generation, but the further out in the roadmap, actually, the more we can accelerate it because SkyWater can work on problems in parallel and we can run more lines at SkyWater, enables us to perfect systems further out in the roadmap. So very exciting moment for the industry. We think we're accelerating the entire US quantum industry by better capitalizing and supporting SkyWater than they could on their own. Very exciting day for IonQ because vertical integration means we're able to go faster ourselves, and exciting also for the fact that we're making quantum computers an increasingly mass market phenomenon where we can manufacture it just like any other computer. And you can imagine this will become, you know, more and more prevalent every year that we advance now that SkyWater is part of IonQ.
Yeah. And the last part, I just want to dig a little deeper on that. What does that mean when you talk about scale and mass manufacturing of quantum computers? How quickly does that happen? What does it look like? What does it also mean from a cost perspective, since I know you have an advantage there?
Yeah, we do. And we've talked a lot about the fact that our systems, as they become more powerful, don't actually become a lot more expensive. And so we're focused on driving the broadest mass market quantum computing ecosystem that we can. We want to see people starting companies using our computers, building software applications. I think we have at least one order of magnitude, potentially two orders of magnitude advantages when you look out at our more powerful machines later this in the 2020s, later this decade. And what that will be translated into is a much broader reach globally, as you see not only cloud access for our new superior range of quantum platform quantum computers, but it will also mean that we can robustly manufacture these in scales that will start to turn up not just in sovereign systems, but for smaller companies that want to pay for partial systems, want to pay for a combination of a partial system and cloud access, for example. And so our business models already operate today in both the sovereign realm and the cloud. And we've been on the cloud, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, you know, the last five years. I think we're the largest cloud partners for most of them in the quantum space.
But you're going to see, you know, by the end of this administration that this increasingly becomes part of the narrative for every company, every applied science research activity, in combination with what's going on in the GPU AI space. Quantum is going to slipstream in and give people superpowers. It's why we're calling this the Superior range.
Um, you just mentioned it, but you did announce today this Superior product line. So, how does it do that? And how does that enable superpowers essentially? Like, what is this going to look like? What is it going to realize?
Yeah, so I'd love to show you our display that's actually here at the NYSE. Takes you through the outline of our chips the last few years and into the future. But you can see that the chips become more complex as we put bigger and bigger quantum computers on it, but they don't become much larger. And so the exciting thing about Superion is our system is upgradeable. So within a generation or two, we can just change the chip in the machine, make a few other tweaks, recalibrate, and the hardware you have is now doubly exponentially more powerful. The fact that we've been able to put ion traps onto a semiconductor-based wafer and then CMOS, which is a proven technology now for many decades, means that our ability to keep cost contained, manufacture at scale, drive an upgrade cycle for our customers and drive a mass market phenomenon is unprecedented.
I also want to highlight that in parallel with Superion being announced today, we're also talking about the fact that we have broken our own record for quantum networking speed. And so in 2024, we held the record for quantum networking speed, interconnecting two quantum computers. We have done a lot of work with the Air Force Research Lab in Rome, New York, connecting quantum computers together. We're doing that because we obviously believe in the coming years there's going to be an era of not just single machines becoming more powerful, putting more ion traps in a single chip, but also quantum data centers are going to happen. And you'll see distributed algorithms at some point, probably by end of this administration as well, begin to be an active research topic as we can connect powerful computers together and build even bigger, more powerful quantum data centers.
I mean, we talked so much about AI data centers. Is this going to be a complement to that? Is it going to be something completely different? How to think about that buildout?
I think it's yes and yes on that one.
