The scramble to turn quantum computing into something commercially useful is heating up, with IonQ snapping up chip manufacturing capacity while D-Wave focuses on getting its technology into live enterprise environments.
US quantum computing company IonQ has agreed to acquire semiconductor foundry SkyWater Technology in a deal valued at about $1.8 billion, giving it direct control over chip manufacturing. The purchase hands IonQ access to SkyWater’s fabrication and packaging capabilities, something the company hopes will help it scale its hardware faster as engineers across the sector continue to wrestle with reliability and performance limits.
IonQ has framed the deal as a step towards building fault-tolerant quantum machines capable of supporting defence, intelligence, and high-performance scientific workloads. The company said that integrated manufacturing could help it deliver processors with hundreds of thousands of qubits later this decade, a milestone widely viewed as the threshold for practical, stable quantum computing.
Beyond technical ambitions, the transaction reflects a growing push across Western quantum programmes to secure domestic production capacity for strategically sensitive technologies. Defence planners increasingly view supply chain control as essential to ensuring trusted hardware and long-term resilience, particularly as quantum computing is expected to underpin next-generation cryptography, sensing, and modelling capabilities.
IonQ may be betting on long-term hardware scale, but Canadian-founded D-Wave is chasing nearer-term commercial traction. The company has signed a $10 million, two-year deal to provide quantum computing-as-a-service to an unnamed Fortune 100 customer.
The deal will see the customer develop operational applications using D-Wave’s systems, which combine annealing-based quantum processors with software tools designed to tackle optimisation challenges such as logistics planning, scheduling, and resource allocation. These types of problems are widely considered among the first areas where quantum technologies may produce measurable business or operational advantages.
The agreement also highlights the emergence of service-based delivery models that allow organisations to access quantum capabilities remotely, avoiding the cost and complexity of building their own infrastructure. For defence and national security users, such models could enable rapid experimentation without committing to long-term capital investment.
The announcements underline how the quantum industry is evolving along two parallel tracks: one focused on scaling hardware to achieve universal quantum computing, and another centred on extracting value from specialised systems already capable of addressing real-world operational challenges. Both approaches are increasingly being shaped by defence priorities, commercial demand, and the geopolitical race to secure technological advantage.
