Key points
- IonQ rose about 12.5% at the open
- IonQ says its decoder runs on one standard CPU
- The test used simulated circuits of up to 408 logical qubits
- A Superion 256 goes to Nvidia's research center in 2027
IonQ (IONQ) shares rose about 12.5% to $45.83 at Wednesday's open, following the company's announcement of an error decoder designed to help quantum computers keep calculations running. The stock price was recorded at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, against Tuesday's $40.74 close.
IonQ calls the decoder the industry's first end-to-end real-time system to run on a single standard CPU. The company announced the result after Tuesday's close, and CNBC linked the rally to the news. The tests used simulated quantum circuits.
In a separate announcement Wednesday, IonQ said its Superion 256 will become the first on-premises quantum computer at Nvidia's (NVDA) Accelerated Quantum Research Center. Installation is scheduled for 2027. Financial terms were not disclosed.
What the decoder does
Qubits are sensitive to noise, so reliable quantum calculations require error correction. Classical software interprets measurements to determine how to account for those errors. If that software falls behind, the quantum calculation can stall.
IonQ says in its release that its decoder handles that processing on one off-the-shelf CPU. Researchers tested it using simulated circuits covering up to 408 logical qubits, described in an August 25 arXiv paper. IonQ says the circuits ran more than 31.5 million quantum operations.
A logical qubit spreads information across multiple physical qubits to protect it from errors. The 408-logical-qubit benchmark therefore does not describe the capacity of the 256-physical-qubit Superion system planned for Nvidia's center.
The added delay depended on the assumed error rate and operating speed. Decoding added less than 0.3% to execution time in the paper's lower-noise tests and stayed under 12% at the higher error rate it tested. The release does not describe a test on IonQ's quantum hardware.
"Successfully validating real-time decoding across hundreds of logical qubits and over millions of logical operations is an important milestone," said Nicolas Delfosse, the paper's co-author and IonQ's quantum research lead. "Moreover, the fact that our decoder runs on a single CPU provides a practical path to commercial-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing."
IonQ says the result supports its Walking Cat architecture and its roadmap beyond 256 physical qubits toward systems with thousands of qubits.
The Nvidia research center deployment
The Superion 256 will connect directly to an Nvidia GB200 NVL72 system through Nvidia's NVQLink, with workloads run on Nvidia's open CUDA-Q software platform. The joint research will focus on hybrid quantum-classical software and large-scale system prototyping. The companies also expect to study portfolio optimization and risk modeling in financial services, materials science, and computational chemistry for drug discovery.
"Every supercomputer will become a quantum supercomputer," said Timothy Costa, Nvidia's vice president and general manager for quantum.
IonQ introduced the Superion platform on September 8. The Superion 256 is available to order, with first customer deliveries expected in 2027. Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi said in the release that IonQ's roadmap to 10,000 qubits and full fault tolerance is "accelerating through vertical integration of our SkyWater CMOS foundry." IonQ has owned SkyWater since July 31, and the foundry also makes D-Wave's processors.
Other quantum stocks rose too
At the 9:30 a.m. Eastern time open, Rigetti Computing (RGTI) was up 6.7% at $17.62. D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) rose 7.6% to $18.89, and Quantum Computing Inc. (QUBT) gained 6.5% to $9.67. Nvidia slipped 0.4% to $228.06.
