IonQ Announces Native Gate Access for Researchers, Issues a Rebuttal to Scorpion Capital, and Wil...

We have a trio of news items to report on IonQ. The first is an announcement that IonQ is making native gate access available to researchers and developers for both their previous generation 11 qubit and their more advanced Aria processor. This feature is available now available for those using IonQ’s direct API, Google Cloud Marketplace integration, and a variety of open-source tools such as Qiskit, Cirq, PennyLane and others. Programming native gates is harder than programming with the textbook gates (things like the Pauli gate, CNOT, etc.) that are typically taught in quantum computing courses, but they allow a programmer to have better control over what is happening on the hardware and provides sophisticated developers with the ability to create circuits that have lower gate depth, lower noise, higher fidelities, fewer qubits, or run faster. IonQ's announcement about this new capability can be seen here.

In other news, IonQ's founders have issued a response to the 183-page Scorpion Capital report that came out last week. This response is available in a blog posting available on the IonQ website here.

We will get an indication of how IonQ is progressing when they announce their Q1 financial results on Monday, May 16th. At the end of March, in their year-end 2021 report, they forecast that the Q1 revenues would be between $1.8 and $2.0 million. We see in a few days whether IonQ will be able to meet or even beat the numbers they had predicted earlier.

May 12, 2022