Quantum News Nexus

Woke up this morning to news of IonQ’s $1.8 billion acquisition of chip manufacturer SkyWater Technology, a Minnesota-based company which has been positioning itself as a “quantum foundry” for the last few years.

SkyWater works with many quantum clients who are not named IonQ, as well as non-quantum clients in sectors such as aerospace, defense, and IoT. IonQ said SkyWater will continue to support those customers, saying in its statement on the deal that SkyWater “remains committed to its current Aerospace and Defense and commercial markets and will continue as a pure-play global semiconductor foundry and merchant supplier, providing new and existing customers with the same high-quality standards they have come to expect. SkyWater will also deliver essential technology building blocks to other companies that are focused on advancing artificial intelligence, quantum computing, electrification, IoT, health diagnostics, and more.”

In addition, IonQ sees SkyWater as a channel to supply its own quantum sensing and quantum networking technologies to other SkyWater customers. These presumably could be other quantum computing companies that do not have those capabilities in-house like IonQ does.

As for IonQ, owning a foundry should accelerate its quantum computing roadmap. “With SkyWater, IonQ strengthens its position as the only vertically integrated full-stack quantum platform company, with embedded access to a Trusted U.S. foundry,” IonQ’s statement said. “IonQ’s manufacturing timelines are expected to accelerate through reduced wafer iteration times and parallelizing wafer prototypes. As a result, the combined company is expected to pull forward functional testing of its 200,000 qubit QPUs in 2028 enabling over 8,000 ultra-high fidelity logical qubits. We believe that IonQ will be positioned as a core quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum security, and quantum sensing provider for the U.S. government, allies and partners. SkyWater will also help ensure accelerated innovation and high-quality manufacturability at scale and with industry-leading costs for IonQ’s technologies.”

The acquisition is part cash, part stock, and you can read on in the link above for the details of how all that will work. The deal, is expected to close later this year, shows that IonQ’s definition of what constitutes a “vertically integrated, full-stack quantum computing company” continues to expand. The company, particularly under the leadership of Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi, continues to be the most aggressively M&A-minded company in the quantum sector by a very large margin.

Image source: IonQ

Quantum News Nexus is a site from freelance writer and editor Dan O’Shea that covers quantum computing, quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum-safe security, and more. You can find him on X @QuantumNewsGuy and doshea14@gmail.com.