IonQ Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi used his “Quantum for Resilience” keynote at Quantum World Congress 2026 to make the case that quantum infrastructure will increasingly become part of how enterprises and governments secure data, maintain navigation and timing, connect computing systems, manufacture critical technology, and control strategic computing resources.
De Masi discussed IonQ’s expanding platform across quantum computing, networking, sensing, security, space, and semiconductor manufacturing; the company’s acquisition of SkyWater Technology; its Superion computing roadmap; recent...
What Niccolo de Masi said
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Niccolo de Masi, IonQ's chairman and CEO, argued that the quantum age is already here and that investing in quantum technologies drives sovereign resilience, turning risk into advantage for enterprises, states, and nations. He outlined six components: security, sensing, networking, discovery, decide, and connection, and highlighted recent achievements including a 20,000-physical-qubit system that could retrieve elliptic encryption keys in three to four weeks, a record kilohertz entanglement rate, and partnerships with EPB, A4L, the Republic of Korea, and Nvidia's NVAQC center. He emphasized IonQ's full-stack platform, including SkyWater foundry services, and noted about a third of customers buy multiple products and a third are international. He closed by stating that full fault tolerance will be affordable for enterprises and state and local governments within a year or two.
Key takeaways
A 20,000-physical-qubit IonQ system could retrieve elliptic encryption keys in about three or four weeks.
IonQ announced partnerships with EPB, A4L, the Republic of Korea, and Nvidia's NVAQC center.
IonQ achieved the world's fastest entanglement rate, now at a kilohertz, four times their 2024 record.
IonQ invests about $500 million a year in R&D and has grown from 35 people in 2019 to 3,500 now.
Numbers and commitments
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20,000
Physical qubits in IonQ system for elliptic key retrieval
Our next speaker leads a company that is especially important to both the quantum industry and to the community hosting us here today. Niccolo De Masi is chairman and CEO of IonQ. They're one of our platinum sponsors and they're a company with very deep roots right here in College Park.
Niccolo brings an unusual combination of experiences to this role. He's a physicist by training, having studied quantum mechanics at Cambridge, but he's also a highly experienced technology executive, investor, and public company leader. In fact, Niccolo helped lead IonQ's transition into the public markets in 2021. He joined the company's board and he became CEO last year. Since then, he's pursued an ambitious vision to build IonQ into something broader than a quantum computing company, but a full-stack quantum technology platform spanning computing, networking, sensing, security, and space. And this year, with the acquisition of SkyWater Technology, IonQ has added advanced semiconductor manufacturing to that platform, bringing together quantum science, engineering, manufacturing, and commercialization in a vertically integrated company.
That's particularly exciting for us because IonQ was born from research conducted right here at the University of Maryland and its headquarters remains here in College Park. So in many ways, IonQ represents exactly what we hope a healthy quantum ecosystem can produce: world-class research becoming a company, a company attracting talent and capital, and that company scaling technology toward real-world impact. We're grateful for IonQ's leadership, its platinum sponsorship of the Quantum World Congress, and its continuing investment in this region. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Niccolo De Masi.
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Masi, N. D. (2026, September 28). Quantum for Resilience: IonQ’s Full-Stack Strategy for the Quantum Age | QWC 2026 [Interview transcript]. Connected DMV. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3025931/
MLA
Niccolo de Masi. "Quantum for Resilience: IonQ’s Full-Stack Strategy for the Quantum Age | QWC 2026." Connected DMV, 28 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3025931/.
BibTeX
@misc{masi2026_3025931,
author = {Niccolo de Masi},
title = {Quantum for Resilience: IonQ’s Full-Stack Strategy for the Quantum Age | QWC 2026},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Connected DMV. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3025931/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
