IonQ vs. Quantinuum Q3: $173.8M vs. $9.1M, Two Paths to Quantum

IonQ and Quantinuum reported their third-quarter 2026 results one after the other on November 5 (local time). Both companies raised their revenue and full-year guidance, but placing the numbers side by side shows that the quantum industry does not yet look one way. One is growing through acquisitions to lift its revenue scale, while the other is putting technical metrics ahead of profits and widening its losses.

The two companies by the numbers

IonQ’s third-quarter (July–September) revenue was $173.8 million, up 336% from a year earlier. The company said it was its sixth consecutive record quarter. It raised its 2026 full-year revenue guidance to $505 million–$515 million, and its remaining performance obligations (RPO; amounts already contracted but not yet recognized as revenue) more than doubled to $1.2 billion.

Net income was a profit of $564 million ($1.42 per share), but a substantial part of it was a non-cash gain from changes in the valuation of warrants (rights to buy shares at a set price). Adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, adjusted for one-off items) was a loss of $133.6 million. Cash and investments stood at $1.7 billion at the end of September, or about $3.7 billion including a $2 billion share offering that closed on October 16. Niccolo de Masi, IonQ’s chairman and CEO, called it “the strongest quarter in the company’s history.”

Quantinuum’s third-quarter revenue was $9.1 million, up 233% from $2.7 million a year earlier. It raised its full-year revenue guidance from $28 million–$32 million to $31 million–$34 million. However, its GAAP (U.S. generally accepted accounting principles) net loss was $118 million, more than double the $52 million of a year earlier, and its adjusted EBITDA loss also widened from $45 million to $80 million. Profitability metrics improved: GAAP gross margin rose from minus 43.5% to 33.3%, and adjusted gross margin rose to 74.6%. Cash stood at $1.94 billion.

Half of IonQ’s revenue comes from a chip factory

IonQ’s $173.8 million in revenue splits into two pieces. Its own IonQ Platform revenue was $90.3 million (+127%), and foundry services revenue from SkyWater Technology, the semiconductor foundry (contract manufacturing plant) it acquired, was $83.5 million. SkyWater accounts for about 48% of the total. In other words, the 336% growth rate includes the revenue of an acquired company.

SkyWater’s orders are also worth noting. SkyWater extended its multi-year manufacturing partnership with D-Wave and signed a new multi-year agreement with Qolab, founded by Nobel laureate John Martinis. SkyWater’s revenue from quantum customers other than IonQ rose more than 30% year on year.

Government and corporate contracts have also piled up. IonQ advanced to Stage C of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), the only trapped-ion company (an approach that confines ions with electric fields and uses them as qubits) to do so. The potential business is worth up to $300 million. IonQ’s Superion 256 will be installed at NVIDIA’s accelerated quantum research center as its first on-premises (installed in the customer’s own facility) quantum computer. Individual contracts reported include $33 million from SDT, $25 million from Florida International University, and $28 million from DARPA for 25 optical atomic clocks (with an option for 100 more worth $30 million).

Quantinuum leads with error-correction performance

Quantinuum puts error-correction performance, rather than revenue, front and center. In October, Helios reached a logical qubit fidelity (the probability that operations performed by error-corrected logical qubits are correct) of 99.9995%, which the company said means errors 10 times lower than its September record and 100 times lower than the best published result on any other hardware approach. Its next-generation system, Sol, is targeted for the second half of 2027, with the task of demonstrating 100 logical qubits and logical error rates on the order of 10 to the minus 5. Apollo is targeted for 2029. The number of organizations using its software platform, Nexus, reached 215, up about 20% from the previous quarter. Rajeeb Hazra, Quantinuum’s president and CEO, set out a goal of building the first developer platform aimed at the fault-tolerant era.

The most eye-catching news of the quarter was what the company called the largest cloud contract in its history. An unnamed “global financial institution” signed a multi-year extension securing committed access not only to Helios but also to Apollo and Nexus.

Why it matters: what the two report cards say

In revenue scale, IonQ is about 19 times larger than Quantinuum ($173.8 million vs. $9.1 million). But even IonQ’s platform revenue excluding SkyWater ($90.3 million) is about 10 times Quantinuum’s. Both companies are still loss-making: adjusted EBITDA losses were $133.6 million at IonQ and $80 million at Quantinuum. The difference is strategy. IonQ is growing revenue and orders through acquisitions and government and corporate contracts, while Quantinuum is building demand for next-generation systems through error-correction performance and its developer platform. It is hard to declare a winner between the two approaches from a single quarter’s numbers. The metrics to watch going forward are the quality of pure quantum revenue, repeatable cloud demand such as that from financial institutions, and the timeline for scaling logical qubits.