Company
ActiveIonQ
College Park, Maryland · Since 2015
Still independent and publicly traded. It sells access to trapped-ion quantum machines. A useful commercial workload is not yet the business.
A later timeline chapter projects a role for this organization. That chapter is a projection. This page is about the institution as it exists, or as it existed.
Chris Monroe and Jungsang Kim founded IonQ in 2015 to build quantum computers from trapped ions, a line of physics Monroe had worked in for years. The company went public in 2021. It sells access to its machines through the cloud.
A useful, steady commercial workload, the kind a customer reorders because it is cheaper than any other method, is not yet the business. The business is the machine, the research contracts, and the claim that the machine will get there. The 2035 chapter says so. It is a projection sitting on top of a real company.
A physics lab with investors
The staff are atomic physicists, control engineers, and the software people who make a fragile device answer a remote request. The jobs do not resemble a data center's, because the object being tended is closer to an experiment than to a server. Headcount is small. The capital is not. That combination, a few very specialized people and a great deal of other people's money, is the current shape of the quantum hardware industry.
Still independent, still early
IonQ remains a public company. It could be bought, outrun, or become a supplier, which is the note on the timeline and not a prediction this page will improve on. What is certain is that the occupation, tending a quantum device, already has a payroll here, and that payroll is not a forecast.
The work it organized
- Atomic physicist
- Control engineer
- Quantum software developer
- Lab technician
On the timeline
Related
- QuantinuumActive
- PsiQuantumActive
- IBMActive