IonQ

First quarter 2026 revenue hit 64.7 million dollars, up 755% year over year, and full year 2025 revenue was 130 million dollars, up 202%. Management just raised 2026 guidance to 270 million dollars at the high end. The signed contract backlog jumped 554% to 470 million dollars, which means real customers signing real deals, not hype.

IonQ is sitting on 3.1 billion dollars in cash and investments as of the end of the first quarter. That gives them years of runway to keep burning cash on research, building factories, and scaling without needing to raise money in a down market. They also sold their first 6th generation, 256 qubit system to the University of Cambridge and just landed a 39 million dollar contract with the Space Development Agency.

This business is losing a huge amount of money. They burned 151 million dollars of operating cash in just the first quarter of 2026, and management is guiding to a full year adjusted EBITDA loss of up to 330 million dollars. The company will not be profitable for years, so the stock trades entirely on the dream of what quantum computing becomes in the future.

IonQ uses trapped ion technology, but Google, IBM, and several well funded startups are racing the same prize with different approaches like superconducting and photonic qubits. Whoever wins commercially scaled, fault tolerant quantum first takes the market. If IonQ loses that race, the stock collapses. The shares are also extremely volatile, with a beta over 3, so expect huge swings.