Quantum Computer Company IonQ Goes Public at $2 Billion

Peter Chapman, CEO and president at IonQ, discusses IonQ going public via a special purpose acquisition company deal with dMY Technology Group. IonQ will have a market capitalization of $2 billion. Chapman believes quantum computing will become mainstream and real-life issues it can solve.

Quantum computing is very good at optimization problems with a cost function. This can have a large impact on logistics.

Chapman worked with Ray Kurzweil and believes quantum computing could eventually help with strong AI. However, this is speculative at this point.

IonQ trapped ion quantum computer is completing a $2 billion SPAC merger which will give it about $600 million in cash to fund its quantum computer developments.

IonQ indicates that its 32 qubit trapped ion quantum computer can achieve a quantum volume of 4 million. Honeywell has the leading commercial quantum computer (also trapped ion) that has a quantum volume of 512. Quantum volume is a quantum computer power benchmark that factors in qubits and the ability of the quantum system to maintain stability and solve a standardized problem.

The investor presentation deck shows that IonQ believes that their error correction will only take 16 dirty qubits to achieve 1 error corrected qubit. Other quantum systems are looking at thousand of dirty qubits to get one error corrected qubit. It is believed that error corrected qubits are needed to achieve massively scaled quantum computers.

IonQ believes that there will be significant early revenue from quantum machines improving aspects of machine learning on regular computers then the next market will be improved materials discovery and then improving chemistry for the end 2026-2030 timeframe.

SOURCES – IonQ, Bloomberg News
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com