The Nvidia of Quantum Computing

- By Chris Wood, Chief Investment Strategist at RiskHedge

Something big happened recently in the quantum computing space...

Something many investors are severely misinterpreting in my view…

A few weeks ago on January 26, quantum pure-play IonQ (IONQ) announced it’s buying a chip manufacturing company called SkyWater Technology in a $1.8 billion cash-and-stock deal.

IONQ started dropping on the news and is still down 26%.

That makes no sense to me.

I know what the bears are saying: “IonQ is buying its revenue growth with acquisitions. Organic revenue growth is weak. Margins aren’t improving. And the company is still burning lots of cash.”

To which I say: none of that matters. Here’s what does:

IonQ is now positioned to become “The Nvidia”…“The Cisco”… and “The TSMC” of quantum.

Think about what made Nvidia, Cisco, and TSMC the giants they are today.

Nvidia didn’t just make chips—it basically built the AI ecosystem, from hardware to software to developer tools, making itself indispensable. If you want to do AI, you need Nvidia. And—despite big efforts to dethrone them—that’s still true today.

Cisco became “the backbone of the internet” by controlling the routers and infrastructure that connected everything together.

TSMC became the world’s contract chip manufacturer, the trusted foundry that everyone—including Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and AMD—depends on to actually build their most advanced designs.

IonQ is positioning itself to be all three of these things for quantum computing.

With the SkyWater acquisition, IonQ says it’s now the only vertically integrated full-stack quantum platform company in existence. SkyWater isn’t just any chip manufacturer—it’s a DMEA-accredited Category 1A Trusted Foundry, meaning it’s authorized to handle the most sensitive defense applications.

IonQ now controls much of the quantum supply chain on U.S. soil, from design and prototyping through manufacturing, packaging, deployment, and ongoing service upgrades. That’s the TSMC side of the story.

But IonQ isn’t just building quantum computers—it’s building quantum networking, quantum sensing, and quantum security products too. When CEO Niccolo de Masi talks about applications “for land, sea, air, and space,” he’s describing the infrastructure for an entirely new communications and computing paradigm. That’s the Cisco side of the story.

Meanwhile, in October 2025 IonQ achieved 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity—a world record.

The company expects to have 200,000 qubit quantum processors—enabling 8,000 ultra-high fidelity logical qubits—in functional testing by 2028, and 2 million physical qubits by 2030.

Physical qubits are the actual hardware—the individual quantum bits that do the computing. Logical qubits are what you get when you put groups of physical qubits together to error-correct each other. You can think of it like this: If you asked one person to remember a phone number, they might get a number or two wrong. But if you asked 100 people to remember it and took a vote on each number, you’d almost certainly get the right answer.

This matters for investors because the ratio of physical qubits to logical qubits tells you how efficient a company’s tech is. If Company A needs 1,000 physical qubits to create one reliable logical qubit, and Company B only needs 100, Company B has a massive advantage in cost, complexity, and scalability.

IonQ’s 99.99% fidelity means its physical qubits make fewer errors, so they need fewer of them to create each logical qubit. That’s why they can talk about 200,000 physical qubits producing 8,000 logical qubits—a ratio of 25:1—while some competitors might need ratios of 1,000:1 or worse.

What this means is that IonQ is setting the technical standards the entire industry will likely be measured against, exactly what Nvidia did with its GPUs.

IonQ also just brought Oxford Ionics into the fold for over $1 billion, adding Oxford’s record-breaking ion-trap technology that can be manufactured on standard semiconductor chips. This means IonQ can now manufacture quantum processors in existing semiconductor fabs using mature chip-making processes. This is critical for scaling up production and driving down costs as quantum moves forward.

What’s more, the company is stacking its bench with serious military chops. IonQ hired Katie Arrington as Chief Information Officer. She’s the former acting Chief Information Officer for the Department of Defense, where she oversaw enterprise IT, cybersecurity, and emerging technology policy for the entire U.S. military. Four-star General Jay Raymond—the founder of the Space Force—recently joined IonQ’s board. These are signals that IonQ is positioning itself as a sovereign defense prime—the domestic, vertically integrated quantum provider for multi-decade “black budget” contracts.

IonQ is sitting on $3.5 billion in cash with a mere $28 million in total debt according to YCharts data. So the company has the runway to keep acquiring, keep hiring, and keep building for years to come.

The market saw the SkyWater deal and sold off. I see a company transforming itself into the essential infrastructure play for an industry poised to potentially create trillions of dollars in global economic value during the 2030s.

While execution risks remain substantial, IonQ’s aggressive moves toward fault-tolerant quantum computing—which CEO Niccolo de Masi says the company will have by the end of 2028—and defense market penetration create a credible path to becoming the dominant quantum infrastructure provider.

Suffice it to say, IonQ is my favorite long-term quantum pure-play.

P.S: We just released The Ultimate Guide to Investing in Quantum Computing (2 Stocks to Buy, 1 to Sell). Read it here. _____________________________

Chris Wood is Chief Investment Strategist at RiskHedge. To get more ideas like this from him, check out his substack Grow or Die.

IonQ Inc. (IONQ) has a Disruption Score of 3.

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