IonQ has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire SkyWater Technology for approximately $1.8 billion in a cash-and-stock transaction. Under the terms of the agreement, SkyWater shareholders will receive $15.00 in cash and $20.00 in IonQ common stock per share, subject to a collar. The acquisition establishes IonQ as a vertically integrated quantum hardware provider, consolidating design, chip fabrication, and advanced packaging within a single domestic U.S. infrastructure.
The integration is projected to accelerate IonQ’s technical roadmap toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. Functional testing for 200,000 physical qubit QPUs—designed to support over 8,000 logical qubits—is now pulled forward to 2028. Furthermore, IonQ expects the acquisition to accelerate the development of its 2,000,000 qubit chip architecture by up to one year. These gains are attributed to reduced wafer iteration times and the ability to conduct parallelized prototyping at SkyWater’s dedicated facilities.
Through this transaction, IonQ gains embedded access to a DMEA Category 1 Trusted U.S. foundry. This onshore manufacturing capability secures an end-to-end domestic supply chain, positioning the company to support IonQ Federal and various Department of Defense initiatives, including the Microelectronics Commons network. SkyWater’s existing facilities in Minnesota, Florida, and Texas will serve as regional quantum production hubs for the combined entity’s computing, networking, and sensing technologies.
Upon the close of the transaction, expected in the second or third quarter of 2026, SkyWater will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary. It will maintain its role as a pure-play semiconductor foundry and merchant supplier for commercial and defense markets. IonQ intends to utilize this merchant model to distribute its proprietary quantum sensing and networking solutions to SkyWater’s established customer base in the aerospace and industrial sectors.
Skywater has been providing foundry services with several other companies in the quantum space including D-Wave, Eeroq, Silicon Quantum Computing, PsiQuantum, and Quamcore. For the near term we don’t expect any of these relationships to change, but how this acquisitions may impact those relationships over the longer term is still yet to be determined.
Financial disclosures accompanying the announcement indicate that IonQ expects its full-year 2025 revenue to reach or exceed the high end of its $106 million to $110 million guidance range. The $1.8 billion total equity value represents a 38% premium over SkyWater’s 30-day volume-weighted average price as of January 23, 2026.
Read the official acquisition announcement from IonQ here.
January 26, 2026
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