What's Going On With IonQ Stock Thursday?

IonQ Inc (NYSE:IONQ) shares are bouncing around in Thursday’s after-hours session after the company announced it reached a significant milestone in developing networked quantum systems at scale.

What Happened: After the market close on Thursday, IonQ said it successfully demonstrated remote ion-ion entanglement, crossing off another milestone of its scaling strategy.

IonQ announced it achieved ion-photon entanglement in February. The remote ion-ion entanglement marks the second of four significant milestones required to develop photonic interconnects and take a foundational step towards quantum networking.

“IonQ’s north star remains scalability at high performance, and the progress we’ve made towards photonic interconnects ensures our customers will have access to large quantum systems capable of tackling the most complex problems,” said Peter Chapman, president and CEO of IonQ.

“We’re consistently making significant headway on our technical roadmap, and customers across academia and business recognize the unique value IonQ’s systems bring as we near the point of commercial quantum advantage.”

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The news comes less than a week after the company announced that it signed a $54.5 million contract with the U.S. Air Force Research Lab and said it remains on track to nearly double its revenue for the third year in a row. IonQ shares are up about 15% since the announcement.

IonQ is scheduled to host a session with data software company Evidentli on Oct. 11. The session will focus on the transformational potential quantum computing offers to the pharmaceutical industry.

According to the event listing, presenters will talk about how new generative AI approaches can transform real-world data 250 times faster than current methods.

IONQ Price Action: IonQ shares closed Thursday up 0.54%. The stock was up another 0.54% in after-hours, trading at $9.30 at the time of publication, according to Benzinga Pro.

Photo: Courtesy of IonQ.