Quantum Hardware — Pure-plays

Quantum Computing Inc. has signed a three-year Framework Agreement with Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, under which QCi will provide cloud-based access to its Dirac-3 system along with an installation in Qatar to support the country's quantum ecosystem and regional leadership. The agreement supports QCi's Entropy Quantum Computing approach, which uses quantum entropy and decoherence as computational resources rather than relying on costly error correction and highly controlled environments. The Dirac-3 platform is a third-generation, rack-mountable system designed to solve complex, real-world optimization problems at room temperature. Among peers, IonQ had progressed through three rounds of tape-outs for its first semiconductor quantum chip and received 256-qubit prototypes by the second quarter of 2026, while Rigetti's 36-qubit Cepheus system uses four 9-qubit chiplets and its Cepheus-1-108Q uses 12 interconnected 9-qubit chiplets and became generally available in April 2026. Over the past year, QCi's shares have plunged 52.4% compared with the industry's 10.9% decline, and the stock trades at a forward 12-month price-to-sales of 40.24X versus the industry's average of 4.20X.

International Business Machines said its subsidiary Anderon won a US$1b federal award to build a U.S. quantum chip foundry, alongside a further US$1b IBM commitment to the project. The planned facility is described as the first stand-alone quantum wafer foundry in the U.S., focused on quantum chip manufacturing under CHIPS Act funding. IBM also announced a partnership with regulatory intelligence provider CUBE to integrate real time global AI rule monitoring into watsonx.governance. The Anderon quantum foundry award and CUBE tie up together represent a US$2b quantum and governance push by the company.

IonQ shares jumped 10.1% in the afternoon session after the quantum computing company announced joint research with Synopsys showing that quantum algorithms accelerated industrial design simulations by up to 14.6%. According to a company press release, the work embedded an advanced quantum algorithm into Synopsys's Ansys LS-DYNA simulation software to reorganize equations more efficiently and cut calculation time for complex automotive and jet-engine simulations. IonQ said the approach helps relieve computational bottlenecks that slow classical supercomputers, and the joint paper earned a first-place Best Paper Award at IEEE Quantum Week 2026. The stock is down 13.5% since the beginning of the year, and at $40.47 per share it is trading 50.7% below its 52-week high of $82.09 from October 2025. The previous big move came 8 days earlier, when the stock dropped 4.4% after Mizuho Securities analyst Vijay Rakesh lowered his price target to $52 from $61 while maintaining a Buy rating following the company's Analyst Day.

Anderon, an IBM subsidiary, finalized a $1 billion research-and-development award from the U.S. Department of Commerce on Wednesday under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. The funding will support Anderon's efforts to advance quantum wafer manufacturing at its facility in Albany, New York, where a 300-millimeter quantum wafer foundry serves customers across the quantum industry. IBM has put up $1 billion of its own money alongside the federal award, and production is underway with quantum wafers already in process. The Anderon award is part of a broader $2 billion package distributed across nine quantum computing companies under the CHIPS and Science Act, with GlobalFoundries in line for $375 million and D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, and Infleqtion each expected to receive $100 million; each of the nine firms will give the federal government a minority ownership stake in exchange for the funding. The finalization follows a letter of intent between IBM and the Commerce Department announced in May, and last week Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum, and Quantinuum each finalized $100 million deals with the department. IBM stock fell 3.3% on Wednesday and has declined nearly 19% this year.

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that two of its research and development projects have been selected through a public solicitation by Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, or NEDO, for support under an initiative to advance quantum computing and other information technology in the post-5G era. The NEDO project is officially known as the Research and Development Project to Strengthen Post-5G Information and Communication System Infrastructure, Accelerating the Development and Demonstration of Next-Generation Quantum Computers to Solve Societal Issues. Following the selection, Mitsubishi Electric will launch its two projects aimed at scaling up quantum computers: Research and Development of Multi-Qubit-Control Laser Systems, and Development of Ultra-Compact, Multi-Channel, Low-Noise Amplifier Modules for Large-Scale Superconducting Quantum Computers. The company said quantum computers are expected to revolutionize computing infrastructure by enabling larger-scale simulations and optimization than conventional computers in fields including medicine and drug discovery, finance, logistics and energy. Because qubits are fragile and highly susceptible to noise, technologies that combine multiple qubits are needed to correct errors, making scaling to the level of one million qubits a key challenge.

Quantinuum has signed a new non-binding memorandum of understanding with Aramco covering industrial quantum computing, a development that may support expectations for future project demand. The news comes as Quantinuum shares trade at US$52.01, down 21.2% over the past month, leaving investors to weigh how much of that price is supported by book value. On that measure the stock trades at a price-to-book ratio of about 4.6x, against an IT sector average near 2.7x and a peer group around 2.1x. The premium appears tied to expectations that Quantinuum's current asset base could support larger economic opportunities than a typical IT hardware or software group, given the interest the Aramco MoU has raised in its long-term project pipeline. One top community narrative holds that Quantinuum is 61% undervalued, citing Helios systems already in commercial use and a defined road map to Sol in 2027 and Apollo in 2029.

IonQ reported its fifth consecutive record quarter, with second-quarter 2026 adjusted EBITDA of negative $120.3 million, and raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $280 million to $290 million. Days before those results, the company closed a $1.8 billion purchase of SkyWater, and at its September 2026 Investor Day management guided combined 2026 revenue to $450 million to $460 million. Trailing twelve-month revenue is about $250 million, up 370.6% from a year earlier against a three-year average growth rate of 176.4%, while the operating margin stands at -408.2%. IonQ is moving its trapped ion machines from laser control to electronic qubit control, placing ion traps on a semiconductor chip that SkyWater fabricates, with the first fully integrated chips back for testing as the company targets system commissioning in 2027. The stock trades at about $37, roughly 55% below its high inside the last year, and at about $14 billion of market value it commands roughly 54 times its own trailing revenue, which does not include SkyWater.

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that its ME Innovation Fund has invested in OptQC Corp., a Japanese startup developing optical quantum computer hardware, marking the fund's sixteenth investment to date. OptQC originated from the University of Tokyo and was established on technologies developed by the university's Furusawa Laboratory, a world leader in optical quantum computing. The startup's optical quantum computer uses a proprietary architecture designed to limit increases in system size as qubit counts grow, and it has already delivered its first commercial system to a public research institution as well as hardware modules to private-sector companies. Through the investment, Mitsubishi Electric expects to gain early insights into OptQC's hardware development technologies, related components, customers and market trends. The company aims to lead the field of quantum computing and create new business opportunities by applying those insights to its own quantum technologies, software implementation knowhow and application development in industrial fields.

Infleqtion announced results from its integration of NVIDIA CUDA-Q Logical with the qLDPC open-source library for quantum error correction research, making it among the first organizations building on the platform NVIDIA just announced as a logical orchestration layer for fault-tolerant quantum algorithms. Working with an early-access version of CUDA-Q Logical, Infleqtion researchers constructed and validated a high-rate quantum error correction code that uses approximately six physical data qubits per logical qubit, representing about a fivefold improvement in code rate over the surface-code approach used for comparison. That physical-to-logical qubit ratio is below 10:1 and represents progress toward Infleqtion's architectural target for near-term systems. Infleqtion open-sourced qLDPC last year in work alongside researchers from JPMorgan Chase, and the company is now extending the workflow toward physical execution by adding syndrome extraction, neutral-atom noise modeling and decoder benchmarking. Chief Technology Officer and General Manager of Quantum Computing Pranav Gokhale said the code and the machine must be designed together, while NVIDIA Director of Quantum Product Sam Stanwyck said the integration shows how researchers can design and evaluate logical qubit workloads end to end. Infleqtion will share additional company updates and new milestones at Quantum World Congress in College Park, Maryland, where Chief Executive Officer Matt Kinsella will deliver a plenary keynote on September 24.

BlueQubit announced the open call for its Quantum Flywheel grant program, a $150,000 initiative created with support from IBM, Amazon Web Services, and NVIDIA accelerated computing. The three-month program provides research teams with cloud compute credits for QPU, CPU, and GPU resources, along with access to frontier AI models and BlueQubit's quantum-native development environment. Proposals are invited across three areas: developing and testing novel quantum algorithms on IBM quantum computers targeting quantum advantage in simulation and optimization, conducting adversarial classical simulation with tensor networks and Pauli-path methods to stress-test published quantum advantage claims, and using frontier AI agents to discover, decode, and evaluate novel quantum error-correction codes aimed at mitigating hardware noise. Selected teams will receive direct access to high-performance classical supercomputing, including NVIDIA GPU instances on AWS and large core CPU machines via BlueQubit's simulation platform, with end-to-end support from code generation to QPU execution on IBM quantum computers. The open call runs for a five-week submission window, and selected researchers will receive three months of continuous hardware and compute access.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is hosting a two-day investment summit in Toronto starting Monday, aiming to attract global capital for more than 160 projects as Canada navigates a trade war with the United States. Confirmed attendees include BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Blackstone President Jon Gray, Temasek CEO Dilhan Pillay and APG Groep CEO Annette Mosman, with the summit matching roughly 100 global investors with Canadian CEOs, companies and local officials. Carney has pledged to attract C$1 trillion, or $721 billion, in investment over the next five years by cutting red tape and developing mining, energy, technology and infrastructure projects, though a government source said major deals could take 12 to 18 months to materialize. The prospectus includes 96 data centers in development, an equity investment in Xanadu's photonic quantum computer targeted for commercialization by 2029-2030, the Crawford Nickel Project, and C$900 million in financing sought for a proposed high-speed transportation pod between Calgary and Edmonton. Canada's foreign direct investment flows have averaged around C$23 billion per quarter in 2024 and 2025, up from C$16.3 billion in 2023 and C$15 billion in 2022, though BMO Capital Markets chief economist Doug Porter cautioned it is difficult to lure greenfield investment in a mature economy like Canada's.

IonQ has launched Superion 256, its sixth-generation quantum computing platform and the foundation for future compute products, with customer deliveries set for 2027. The platform moved from early design to trapping ions in under a year, and IonQ fabricated its first fully integrated 256-qubit quantum processing units at its SkyWater subsidiary, with prototype Superion 256 systems now trapping ions at multiple U.S. facilities. IonQ and SkyWater jointly designed and fabricated the chip, completing six tapeouts in the first half of 2026 and cutting the design cycle to two months from nine months, while delivering 12 times more wafer lots over six months than at a previous foundry. At the core of Superion 256 is IonQ's Electronic Qubit Control, which controls trapped-ion qubits with electronics integrated directly into the chip rather than with laser systems, using the same technology behind IonQ's 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity world record in October 2025. The platform scales from 256 qubits to millions of qubits, and Superion 10K is already underway, integrating CMOS into the chip. IonQ is taking orders for Superion 256 now and pre-sold its first system in the first quarter of 2026, while production-grade systems will also run on its cloud.

Infleqtion announced a collaboration with Cisco to pursue joint research and development focused on connecting, operating, and scaling quantum systems. The two companies will explore architectures to link individual devices into distributed, more capable networks, an important step toward making distributed quantum systems a reality. The work pairs Infleqtion's neutral-atom quantum computers and sensors with Cisco's networking stack, and Cisco is advancing research on an end-to-end quantum networking stack designed to dynamically distribute quantum entanglement across connected devices on demand, including the recently debuted Cisco Universal Quantum Switch research prototype. The companies intend to explore convergence of sensing and compute, quantum memory and optical transduction, and network-aware quantum software. Representatives from both companies will appear at the Quantum World Congress September 23 to 25 in College Park, Maryland, and the Cisco Quantum Summit October 6 to 7, held virtually.

IBM and Lockheed Martin, through an offset agreement with armasuisse, Switzerland's Federal Office for Defence Procurement, established a hub for quantum innovation at ETH Zurich that will host the country's first IBM Quantum System Two at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center in Lugano. IBM will operate the system, which will be powered by an IBM Quantum Nighthawk, the company's most advanced processor, with deployment expected by the end of 2026. ETH Zurich will provide expertise, resources and technologies for Swiss industries, startups and academia, including access to the quantum computer, and organizations joining the hub will also have immediate access to IBM's fleet of quantum computers available over the cloud. The collaboration includes two planned joint development projects between IBM and Lockheed Martin, exploring quantum sensing applications for navigation and the improvement of additive manufacturing of metallic alloys. The initiative builds on a long-standing IBM and ETH Zurich relationship that includes a recently launched 10-year effort to advance foundational algorithmic research, and it extends the strategic collaboration between Lockheed Martin and IBM in quantum and AI.

IonQ Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi said on CNBC that a 2,000-qubit quantum computer could break Bitcoin's elliptic-curve encryption in under 26 days, reiterating his expectation for "Q-Day" in 2028. He noted the capability "is not here yet" but argued the timeline is compressing, citing a four-order-of-magnitude drop in qubits needed to break encryption over the past 15 years. IonQ is accelerating its path to 10,000 qubits in 2027 and plans to commission 256-qubit systems that year, after reporting Q2 revenue of $80.1 million, up 287% year over year, with full-year 2026 guidance of $280 million to $290 million. De Masi acknowledged IonQ's dual role as a quantum security solution provider, having launched the ClavisXG Multiplex QKD product, while Bitcoin traded near $79,530 and Strategy resumed buying with a $370 million purchase. IonQ shares last traded at $39.17, down 11.84% over the past month.

Quantum computing stocks rallied Tuesday after three companies secured $100 million each in U.S. government funding, while IonQ raised its 2026 revenue forecast. D-Wave, Rigetti, and Quantinuum each received $100 million from the U.S. Department of Commerce through the CHIPS and Science Act, with the government taking minority equity positions. The funding is earmarked for research and development, not immediate sales, helping recipients tackle technical challenges as they scale quantum systems. IonQ separately lifted its 2026 revenue outlook to $450 million to $460 million from $280 million to $290 million, and introduced its Superion 256 platform with customer deliveries planned for 2027. In trading, D-Wave Quantum gained 6%, Rigetti Computing rose 4%, Quantum Computing added 2.6%, and IonQ climbed 2% even as the broader market fell.

Xanadu Quantum Technologies and ASML have announced a collaboration to develop advanced lithography processes for Xanadu's photonic quantum hardware, aiming to reduce optical losses in quantum computing chips and accelerate the path to utility-scale quantum computing. The partnership will explore how lithography innovations can improve patterning control and lower-loss photonic structures, addressing the technical challenge of optical loss influenced by line edge roughness. Xanadu's CEO, Dr. Christian Weedbrook, emphasized the importance of fault tolerance and error correction, while ASML's Stan Baron expressed enthusiasm for supporting next-generation photonics applications. This collaboration marks a significant step for Xanadu in advancing its photonic quantum technology and solidifying its position in the semiconductor and quantum computing ecosystem.

Fujitsu has announced the development of the world's first working prototype of a diamond-spin quantum computer that incorporates tin-vacancy centers into photonic integrated circuits, marking a significant step toward scalable quantum computing. The prototype operates at -271.6°C, which is higher than the typical operating temperature of superconducting quantum computers, and has been demonstrated to work with Fujitsu's Hybrid Quantum Computing Platform without requiring specialist knowledge. This achievement builds on joint research initiated in 2020 with Delft University of Technology and QuTech, and represents a milestone toward a modular architecture for scaling quantum computers. Fujitsu's roadmap targets a 250 logical qubit system by fiscal 2030 and a 1,000 logical qubit system by fiscal 2035, with the diamond-spin approach offering high fidelity and optical connectivity that could also integrate with superconducting systems.

Quantinuum, a leading quantum computing company, has signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding with Aramco, one of the world's leading integrated energy and chemicals companies, to explore synergies in industrial quantum computing research, applications, and expertise. The MOU aims to support innovation and operational excellence within the energy sector by identifying Aramco's challenges suitable for quantum computing research, with an emphasis on solving complex problems in energy and digital transformation. The companies intend to undertake preliminary technical onboarding, engage in knowledge exchange, and prepare for a potential research collaboration focused on fault-tolerant quantum computing. Quantinuum's President and CEO, Dr. Rajeeb Hazra, stated that the MOU creates a framework for the two companies to exchange expertise and build a strong foundation for research across future generations of quantum computing.

Diraq and Equinix announced plans to deploy a Diraq quantum computer at an Equinix data center in Sydney, Australia, marking the world's first silicon spin quantum computer to operate in a shared commercial data center. The system features an eight-qubit silicon chip with self-contained cryogenic cooling and control electronics, drawing less than 20kW of power and fitting within existing data center infrastructure. Scaling to higher qubit counts requires only a chip replacement, making the system easily upgradable. The collaboration aims to test real-world performance, chart a path to commercial scale, and begin partner and customer conversations. Installation at Equinix's Sydney data center is expected to be completed in October 2026.

D-Wave Quantum's stock has dropped about 21% over the past three months even as its contracted backlog grew nearly eightfold to $40.7 million by the end of June. First-half 2026 bookings reached $35.5 million, six times the $5.9 million of revenue recognized in the same period, with revenue down from $18.1 million a year earlier largely because $13.7 million of that came from a single annealing system sale. Management expects to ship two annealing quantum computers in the fourth quarter, including a $20 million machine for Florida Atlantic University, and says the fourth quarter should carry most of the year's revenue. Six customer applications are now in production, supplying over 37% of first-half subscription revenue compared with 9.8% a year earlier, with AT&T cutting a network task from about an hour to under 15 seconds and NTT DOCOMO reducing location registration signals by roughly 65%. The company posted a first-half adjusted EBITDA loss of $69.9 million against $546.2 million of cash and marketable securities, and the stock trades at more than 600 times trailing sales.

Quantum Computing Inc. reported second-quarter revenue of $5.6 million, more than 9,000% higher than the $61,000 it posted a year earlier, according to its SEC filing. Revenue grew 51% from the first quarter's $3.7 million, driven by photonics product sales across government, educational, and commercial customers. Net loss narrowed to $11.8 million from $36.5 million a year earlier, helped by a shrinking paper loss on warrant derivatives, while the company ended the quarter with a $42.5 million order backlog and $1.3 billion in cash. The quarter also included the acquisition of NHanced Semiconductors, which launched a second chip fabrication facility and contributed to a 114% rise in operating expenses to $21.8 million. The stock traded near $9 on Friday, Aug. 21, part of a rally that lifted seven quantum computing stocks, including D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, IonQ, Infleqtion, IQM Quantum Computers, and IBM.