IonQ Achieves Technical Milestone One Year Ahead of Schedule

Insider Brief

• IonQ announced that it hit its target technical milestone of 35 algorithmic qubits (#AQ) a full year ahead of schedule.
• The milestone was achieved on the IonQ Forte through hardware and software improvements.
• IonQ officials report that the higher the #AQ a system offers, the more commercial value IonQ can deliver to customers and partners.
• Side view of IonQ Forte EGT (evaporated glass ion trap chip) (Image Courtesy: IonQ)

PRESS RELEASE — IonQ (NYSE: IONQ), a leader in the quantum computing industry, announced that it hit its target technical milestone of 35 algorithmic qubits (#AQ) a full year ahead of schedule. This important milestone was achieved on IonQ Forte and leveraged the unique advantages of IonQ’s quantum computers, including high-fidelity trapped ion qubits and the industry’s only all-to-all connected architecture.

At #AQ 35, IonQ’s systems will now be more useful than ever for tackling quantum applications, such as those in quantum machine learning and quantum chemistry.

“Achieving our 2024 technical performance milestone a year early furthers IonQ’s technical leadership in developing the world’s most powerful and accurate commercially available quantum systems,” said Peter Chapman, CEO & President of IonQ. “IonQ is building quantum computing systems that can deliver value to our customers by successfully executing the applications they care about. Each year, we are aggressively delivering against our roadmap and our goal of driving large-scale commercial quantum adoption.”

The company’s performance results were achieved on IonQ’s Forte through hardware and software improvements including increasing the system’s qubit count, improving optical detection hardware and deploying a new, optimized quantum program compiler. Additional technical details are available in a blog post here and a forthcoming research paper.

IonQ adopted #AQ as a primary technical benchmark and has been laser-focused on optimizing across the full quantum computing stack to attain the ambitious targets laid out in the company’s roadmap. The higher the #AQ a system offers, the more commercial value IonQ can deliver to customers and partners.

The single-number AQ metric is derived from algorithmic benchmarking protocols established in an independent industry-wide study conducted by the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C). In this benchmark the most complex circuits, in terms of the number of qubits and number of gates, determine the resulting #AQ score. At #AQ 35, IonQ Forte is capable of considering more than 34 billion different possibilities simultaneously.

International organizations like QuantumBasel have already purchased IonQ’s #AQ 35 system. “IonQ hitting its #AQ 35 target benefits the entire quantum economy as it creates new opportunities for even more complex circuits and algorithms to be conducted,” said Damir Bogdan, CEO of QuantumBasel. “We look forward to utilizing these new capabilities at our uptownBasel innovation campus and exploring breakthroughs in fields such as logistics, finance, pharma, chemistry, and artificial intelligence.”

IonQ’s quantum computers are the only systems available on all three major cloud platforms – Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as through direct API access. Current customers taking advantage of IonQ’s quantum systems include Airbus, Hyundai Motors, and the United States Air Force Research Laboratory.