Switch off the editor’s digest free of charge
Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The US Quantum Computing Company Ionq has agreed to buy a British technology start-up that was carried out by Oxford University worth 1.1 billion USD as a breakthroughs in sector sparks for deal-makeing activity.
Ionq based in Maryland, which had a market value of almost 10 billion USD on Friday, is one of the companies at the top of the field, where technology groups such as IBM and Google Parent Alphabet race for more powerful and slightly operational quantum computers.
In contrast to conventional computers, which solve problems using bits, quantum computers solve quantum bits or qubits, information can be processed in an exponentially faster rate and may make great progress in areas such as the detection of medicinal products. But higher error rates have proven to be a stumbling block for the resulting sector.
On Monday, Ionq announced that it had completed an all-standard deal of USD 1.07 billion for the purchase of Oxford Ionics, under which the investors of the British start-up are preserved between 7.3 percent and 11.9 percent of the main shares of IONQ, depending on the share price in advance of the degree. The deal is expected to be completed this year. Oxford Ionics investors also receive $ 10 million in cash.
Ionq’s newly appointed managing director Niccolo de Masi said that the acquisition would help the company to achieve its goal of becoming “the Nvidia of Quantum”.
“This is a progress in the world that thinks earlier and faster than people,” de Masi told Financial Times.
The recording of Oxford Ionics enables Ionq to generate a so -called fault -tolerant quantum computer with processing performance of 80,000 logical quBITs and 2 million physical quBits by the end of the decade, the company said on Monday. IBM, which has developed one of the most powerful quantum machines with more than 1,000 qubits, tries to develop a supercomputer of 100,000 qubits by 2033.
Oxford Ionics, which was founded in 2019 by the physicists of Oxford University Chris Ballance and Tom Harty, is one of the most accurate quantum machines with the ion assembly technology, which was produced on standard half-lane chips and suffer from a much lower number of random errors. The 80-strong workforce of Oxford Ionics, including its founders, will join Ionq after the deal has been completed.
Ionq has registered customers like the OAK Ridge National Laboratory, the British drug maker Astrazeneca and the Airbus production group supported by the US government. This year, the company is expected to achieve between $ 75 million in the income of $ 75 million by using its quantum computer processing performance to solve problems for its customers.
The takeover of Oxford Ionics will be the sixth acquisition of IonQ since the end of December 2022, since the group has tried to consolidate its status as the largest pure quantum computing company worldwide.
The IONQ shares in New York almost quadrupled last year, since the excitement about Quantum Computing after the boom of shares for artificial intelligence grew and it results in a share price of $ 39 per piece.
