IonQ to buy Oxford Ionics in $1B+ quantum hardware acquisition

IonQ Inc. today announced plans to acquire Oxford Ionics Ltd, a fellow developer of quantum computing chips, for $1.075 billion.

The company will finance the deal with a combination of its own stock and $10 million in cash. The acquisition is expected to close by year’s end.

Both IonQ, which trades on the NYSE, and Oxford Ionics develop quantum chips based on a so-called trapped ion design. The technology is powered by qubits made of ytterbium, a silvery metal that is also used in devices such as X-ray machines. Each qubit is a single ytterbium atom with a positive electrical charge.

IonQ’s flagship quantum system is a single-core processor called Forte. It includes 36 ytterbium qubits suspended in a vacuum chamber. According to the company, the qubits are held in place by the electrical fields of tiny electrodes. The vacuum chamber is cooled to near absolute zero using a combination of the Doppler effect, a physical phenomenon that astronomers rely on to study planets, and lasers.

Forte also uses lasers to carry out calculations. Inside the system’s vacuum chamber, there’s one laser beam for each qubit and a so-called global beam. The qubit-integrated lasers interact with the global beam to produce optical inference, which changes the qubits’ configuration in a manner that facilitates computations.

U.K.-based Oxford Ionics is also building trapped ion chips with ytterbium qubits. Unlike IonQ, however, the Oxford University spinoff doesn’t rely on lasers to program the qubits. Instead, it performs the task using electrodes embedded into a chip.

The company’s technology promises to provide several benefits over laser-based approaches. One is scalability: Oxford Ionics says that its chip is better than lasers at powering large-scale quantum computers. Furthermore, the chip can be made using standard semiconductor manufacturing processes. That could make it relatively simple to mass produce, an important prerequisite to commercialization.

Last month, Oxford Ionics detailed that it has built several quantum systems based on its technology. In the future, the company plans to switch its qubit management chip to an architecture dubbed WISE. The architecture replaces several of the current chip’s components with so-called switches, tiny structures that each contain a few transistors and certain other circuits.

“Their groundbreaking ion-trap-on-a-chip technology will accelerate IonQ’s commercial quantum computer miniaturization and global delivery,” said IonQ Chief Executive Officer Niccolo de Masi.

IonQ will use Oxford Ionics’ technology to enhance its quantum chips. Next year, the company plans to introduce a system with 256 qubits, or more than seven times as many as its flagship Forte device. IonQ hopes to follow up the launch with a 10,000-qubit system in 2027 and a device containing 2 million qubits by 2030.

Photo: IonQ

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