June 12, 2025: IonQ earlier this week it has agreed to acquire Oxford Ionics for US$1.075 billion, the largest deal in the quantum computing industry to date, according to IonQ.
The transaction will consist mostly of US$1.065 billion in IonQ shares (representing around 10 percent of IonQ’s market cap of ~US$10 billion at the time of writing) and approximately US$10 million in cash (source: IonQ press release).
IonQ said the deal represents a consolidation of talent and resources in the quantum computing industry, a trend that IDTechEx has predicted to emerge as the industry matures and talent shortages become more pressing.
“Over the last decade, quantum computers have emerged from lab experiments to a burgeoning technology industry with IDTechEx forecasting the revenue from hardware sales alone to exceed US$10 billion by 2045 in their latest Quantum Computing Market report,” IonQ said in its announcement.
Founded in 2015, IonQ uses the ion trap modality, rivaled primarily by the Cambridge (UK) based company Quantinuum, which emerged from a merger of Honeywell and Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) in 2021.
In the last few months, IonQ has made multiple acquisitions that culminated in Oxford Ionics deal. In May 2025, IonQ acquired ID Quantique, a quantum networking and communications company which has focused on commercialization of quantum key distribution (QKD) and quantum random number generators (QRNG). ID Quantique’s development of high-performance single photon detectors will also integrate into IonQ’s model of photonic connectivity between quantum computing clusters. Other acquisitions include entangled photon source company Qubitekk in November 2024 and photonic interconnect company Lightsynq at the beginning of June 2025.
This roll-up of quantum companies represents IonQ’s strategy to spread their capabilities across quantum computing, sensing, and communications, as well as an ongoing focus of IonQ to strengthen their capabilities in photonics, which play a key role in their system design.
Oxford Ionics was founded in 2019 and, according to IonQ, has demonstrated technical results in in gate fidelities and error reduction. The most important asset of Oxford Ionics “may be in their proprietary manufacturing of ion traps,” IonQ said. Through Oxford Ionics’ collaboration with Infineon, they have developed on-chip microwave ion traps that can be manufactured in CMOS-compatible processes. This innovation works to alleviate one of the largest pain points in conventional ion traps by avoiding the need for complex arrays of lasers to control the trapped qubits.
