IonQ

Third quarter revenue hit 173.8 million dollars, up 336% from a year ago, its sixth record quarter in a row. The core quantum business grew 127% to 90.3 million dollars, and IonQ raised its full year forecast to 505 to 515 million dollars. Signed contracts waiting to be delivered more than doubled to 1.2 billion dollars, so a lot of future growth is already lined up.

NVIDIA, the company powering the AI boom, picked IonQ's newest Superion machine as the first quantum computer installed at its own quantum research center, wired directly into its AI supercomputers. IonQ was also the only company using its atom based approach to reach the final stage of a Defense Department research contest, a program that could be worth up to 300 million dollars. With 3.7 billion dollars in cash after a recent stock sale, it has plenty of fuel to keep building.

IonQ reported a 564 million dollar profit this quarter, but it came from an accounting adjustment, not from customers. Strip that out and the core business still lost about 134 million dollars in just three months. To keep funding the buildout, IonQ sold 2 billion dollars of new stock in October, which shrinks every existing owner's slice of the pie.

Almost half of this quarter's revenue, 83.5 million dollars, came from SkyWater, a chip factory IonQ just bought, so the 336% jump was partly purchased rather than grown from scratch. Meanwhile Google, IBM, and well funded startups are racing to build the first truly useful quantum computer using different technology. The stock also moves more than three times as hard as the overall market, so expect wild swings.