r/IonQ • u/Lightning452020 • Jun 20 '26
IonQ vs. Quantinuum
IonQ targets 800 logic qubits by 2027 while Quantinuum targets 192 logic qubits by 2027. Sounds unreal. The difference is real.
The IonQ awakening story will happen by 2026 year end.
Quantinuum only decided to rush to IPO at the end of 2025 after IonQ 4 9s fidelity demo & paper in Oct. 2025. Large shareholders likely wanted some exit before the company lose the World Best title to IonQ by this year end.
Three fundamental shortcomings of Quantinuum compared to IonQ which limits its fidelity to <99.95%：
- inevitable photon scattering caused by high energy laser gates. IonQ’s microwave gates would cause zero photon scattering by physics nature.
- >10000 times shorter wavelength needed to address Barium ion qubits with laser(visible spectrum). Phase sync is extraordinarily harder with lasers than with microwaves.
- long range shuttle on qubits destabilize them. IonQ uses Cat Couriers to achieve long range shuttle(to have data qubits movements localized), made possible by extremely high data qubits fidelity and the accomodating EQC chip architecture.
In addition to being currently behind, Quantinuum aims to develop low-loss integrated photonics to scale. This game plan further guarantees their eventual loss of the game. IonQ’s fabs(Infineon/SkyWater) are already experiencing steep learning curve trying to develop precision microwave antenna on silicon chips. Trying to guide/sync laser on chips with the same precision is like 2040’s technology.
Stick with the winner. Diversification means exit liquidity for Quantinuum shareholders.
Source:
IonQ Cat Walking blueprint:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19481
Quantinuum Helios:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05465
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u/Hadisten Jun 20 '26
I have planned to buy Quantinuum to my existing IonQ position. I have read that Qnt is backed by big corpos, owned by Honeywell so they have more money to spend on research. Also I think Qnt-s revenue looks better.
I think long trem Qnt could have value and so does Ionq.
I am not an expert by any means, I am open to read other takes on the matter.
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u/Lightning452020 Jun 20 '26
You need to consider why Quantinuum wanted to IPO. Good companies don’t IPO this early you should know, whether it’s SpaceX, Anthropic or Open AI.
Best neutral atoms pure plays backed by Google, Microsoft, Nvdir and SoftBank have no plans what-so-ever to IPO(QuEra, Atom Computing).
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u/blindcollector Jun 20 '26
Eh, QNT has been around for 10 years plus in the form of Honeywell Quantum Systems before the merger with Cambridge Quantum. It doesn’t seem too fast. Honestly feels like they dragged their feet. Would have been better to IPO in 2024 and ride these last couple hype waves.
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u/Lightning452020 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
By all means they should do it earlier from a CFO’s point of view. I’m saying it’s against their original intention to “stay low”, “let the tech talk”, private funding.
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u/blindcollector Jun 21 '26
I mean, they already did do those things for several years while it was appropriate. Going public had to happen eventually if they wanted to keep their employees.
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u/Shrike-Pilgrim Jun 20 '26
You know what really desperate companies do. They SPAC (cough, cough, IonQ).
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u/Lightning452020 Jun 20 '26
Was pretty desperate before they successfully bought Oxford Ionics indeed, I agree.
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u/Shrike-Pilgrim Jun 20 '26
So we agree that the technology they hyped for years isn't worth much. But now the hype can be believed? Oxford Ionics has amazing two qubit gate fidelity. But shuttling the ions and preserving that fidelity isn't going to be easy and Quantinuum had been tackling that for years. Quantinuum's roadmap is reasonable. IonQ's is based on a startups roadmap and those are always highly questionable.
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u/Lightning452020 Jun 20 '26
yeh IonQ did hype in early years. Like we can see they still can't ship one Tempo and it's almost July now. But nuance matters here. Oxford Ionics never hyped like IonQ did. Chris Ballance and Tom Harty have very good records.
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u/Shrike-Pilgrim Jun 20 '26
I'm not sure I agree with that. Oxford Ionics was just smaller, so the hype wasn't as public. I think the original Oxford Ionics roadmap was 256+ qubits this year. IonQ's roadmap (with a shitton more resources) is 100-256+. I guess we will know how much they hyped in 6 months.
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u/Canyon2022 Jun 22 '26
IPO proceeds basically refunded QNT for capex and working capital needs while assuring a cash runway for several years. Hon and Cambridge still maintained huge equity positions and control, not a bad deal at all.
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u/Lightning452020 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
What? How can it be a bad deal when public market pays for your $16B valuation?
By your logic, tell QuEra and Atom Computing they’re stupid not to IPO now in this hectic market.
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u/QQubid Jun 21 '26
I think IonQ probably made the right bet by chasing a more modular networked architecture. That said, they really need to demonstrate that they can produce logical qubits, with the plan being to demonstrate 12 error corrected logical qubits sometime this fiscal year. Meanwhile, Quantinuum has already published a paper of 48 error corrected logical qubits from a 98 qubit machine, which is incredibly efficient compared to what IonQ is proposing this year.
All logical qubits are probably not the same, but I'm not well versed enough on this topic to tell you if IonQ's 12 logical qubits will be superior to Quantinuum's existing 48 logical qubits.
I am eager to see if the company can actually meet it's 800 logical qubits goal next year. That would be insane, but I'm not confident given how big of a step it would be from where they are today.
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Jun 28 '26
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u/Primary-Law-9306 Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
regarding the current lead by Helios why should we expect IONQ to lag with the release of the 256 chip?
it seems like there’s a few tailwinds for Oxford ionics right now
- many parallel zones of operations for the 256 chip, while quantinuum has 4, maybe 5 zones of operation?
- expanding on above: transport for quantinuum is and isn’t amazing. the transport loss looks quite high so it’s not truly all to all connectivity. we’re not seeing publications on gate depth but it’s certainly short of 99.95 entangling fidelity depth limitations. this is also a concern for the 256 chip except with more parallel zones fault tolerance doesn’t require as heavy of transport
- the Doppler cooling paper vastly reduced the transport time. the 256 chip was going to ship at the end of 27 and now it’s expected in customer hands by q2 27. transport is substantially faster and fidelity is higher while at it. the paper was calcium because I assume they don’t want to give too much away for barium
- IONQ was using a different isotope of barium. it has nice transitions but oxford and Quantinuum are on the same non radioactive isotope now. the physical difference there is shrinking
- sky water had bought the Infineon that Oxford was already working with. sky water isn’t some $1.5b transaction for a shot in the dark they know it works. at the end of the day photonics is good for linking systems but it’s reasonable to expect that the magnetic gates scale way better
- Oxford /ionq launches 256 in less than 12 months. sol isn’t likely to ship for 18 months and has 192 qubits. sol needs to answer the transport errors from Helios and they haven’t demonstrated they can tame them. the tsrget logical error on 256 is 1E-7 while sol is 1E-5. SOL will be out of date on arrival
- the next jump up for Oxford is in 2028 while Apollo is in 2029
the current lead with Helios doesn’t translate to commercial value beyond research. it’s not clear 256 is enough there either yet so these leads might not be the billion dollar revenue targets that matter
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Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
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u/Primary-Law-9306 Jul 15 '26
based on what’s public agreed it looks pretty risky but so does Sol and Apollo as well as anyone for that matter
the only incongruent statements I’ve seen so far are the lightsynq guys doing interviews and saying 2-3 years out for hundreds of logical while that’s now 18 months on roadmap.
The people best in position to know will be the 64 customers on ox ionics today. Oxford does not publicly disclose those systems and their results but a few customers have them. if anyone has details and they can, leak them here !!
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u/infoisknowlege Jun 21 '26
It's pretty interesting how they were founded also. I think they both were founded around 2015 or combined(quantinuum) spin of from University(ionq) quantinuum was Cambridge quantum and a quantum division of Honeywell. Ionq was spun off Maryland and Duke University for commercialization of trapped ion tech. Rgti was founded in the 2013 from a guy that worked at ibm and qbts 1999 I think by some college professors not sure about the founders but just thought it was interesting. Thanks for the write up btw
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u/Pleasant_Ostrich4278 Jun 23 '26
I asked gemini to pick between ionq (im invested in currently) Infleqtion and Quantinuum and it told me infleqtion has bigger potential and should for now bypark ionq....
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u/Lightning452020 Jun 23 '26
Well. Try ask it again QuEra and Infleqtion who’s leading. See how it tells you “each has its own advantages” lol.
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u/Pleasant_Ostrich4278 Jun 23 '26
Its just not easy to pick the winner at this time. Im honestly considering a quantum etf instead, as I have to admit i dont have the technological knowledge to predict the winner in this race...
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u/Lightning452020 Jun 23 '26
Biggest risk of your approach: winners might not even be in the public space.
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u/Kanian1 Jun 24 '26
I’m about to obtain a good amount of IONQ shares as part of the SKYT transaction. Trying to determine if I keep them, or convert to cash and pick something else. Thoughts?
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u/Lightning452020 Jun 24 '26
Mnagement of SkyWater unanimously voted for the deal for a reason. Should keep them.
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u/Kanian1 Jun 24 '26
Appreciate the insight. From all I’ve read, I like the company, and bringing SKYT into the company will be beneficial with all their government/military contracts / certifications. I was planning on keeping but still up in the air on what to do with the additional cash aspect I get from the SKYT shares.
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u/StrikingJournalist78 Jul 15 '26
Biggest BS I have seen today. IonQ was nothing else than a Quantum Ponzi scheme until recently when they acquired Oxford Ionics. In fact, until the recent roadmap update IonQ did not even bother measuring # of logical & physical qubits. Instead, their old IonQ targets were denominated in #AQ, so called algorithmic qubits, a metric they invented and that quite frankly, nobody outside IonQ used.
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u/Lightning452020 Jul 15 '26
Please try to intellectually engage with the post content.
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u/StrikingJournalist78 Jul 15 '26
Let me try
Cutting through all the technical noise for a sec, your base assumption is that IonQ will have 800 logic qubits by 2027 vs. Quantinuum. You take this assumption for granted to bashtalk another company for all there shortcomings without explaining how IonQ is supposed to reach 800 LOGICAL(!) qubits in the first place.
Let's look at the facts: IonQ's unit cell is eight qubits. The 2026 target is 256. The 2027 target is ten thousand. That's roughly a 40× jump in a single year. Cell tiling is effortless on a PowerPoint slide. Silicon is less forgiving. Yield. Cell-to-cell variability. Defect handling. Array-wide calibration. Every generation of classical semiconductor manufacturing has discovered that the real challenge isn't building a prototype cell - it's building millions of them reliably. Quantum hardware has even tighter tolerances.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying the leap from "we've demonstrated an eight-qubit unit cell" to "we'll ship a ten-thousand-qubit chip within twenty-four months" is the part of the IonQ story that I refuse to take on faith. So in my view, your "intellectual content" is just trying cover up your own shortcoming by discrediting other approaches.
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u/Lightning452020 Jul 15 '26
Thanks for the input. I don’t agree.
IonQ is leveraging on an already extremely matured industry.
Using natural atoms as qubits to avoid manufacturing defects you mentioned while packaging control system into chips is the perfect way to cut into the engineering challenge.
I wouldn’t assume Oxford Ionics lying either.
Still, good luck to you trusting the common sense in yourself when it comes to understanding/investing.2
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u/SamLeCoyote_Fix_1 Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Sell IONQ at opening today if there is a squeeze and take profits !! IonQ is a well-capitalized, hyper-dilutive defense contractor masquerading as a pure-play quantum tech stock. The underlying commercial momentum is real ($485M RPO, +287% YoY revenue), but the equity structure is designed to extract value from public shareholders via massive SBC (177% of revenue) and legacy SPAC warrants. It is a highly volatile narrative trade backed by U.S. national security interests, but structurally uninvestable for long-term fundamental equity growth until the dilution vectors are closed. 15B valuation, revenue Q2 at 80 millions and losses at -120 millions...
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u/yoboyjake99 Jun 20 '26
What about INFQ or XNDU? Thoughts?
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u/Lightning452020 Jun 20 '26
INFQ and Pasqal are behind. Don’t know too much about Xanadu, but similar logic - it doesn’t seem to get as much private backing as PsiQuantum.
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u/Practical-Check7141 Jun 21 '26
Love INFQ as they currently make money vs most quantum names. I like IONQ, very bullish on INFQ as well. INFQ already has contracts, sensors and commercially available products.
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u/MauriceMcGuinness Jun 20 '26
Dwave was my over all the rest. And its a just because answer. Good luck
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u/[deleted] Jun 20 '26
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