Key Points
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IonQ has raised its 2026 revenue guidance twice this year, most recently to a range of $280 million to $290 million.
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Management deferred combined-company guidance after closing the SkyWater acquisition, saying numbers would come once operations are integrated.
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A market value near 54 times this year’s guided sales already banks on rapid growth continuing well past 2026.
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Quantum computing company IonQ (NYSE:IONQ) hosts an investor day on Tuesday, Sept. 8. And I expect the event to produce something the company has never put in its guidance: a revenue forecast that reaches beyond the current year.
Second-quarter revenue rose 287% year over year to about $80 million, the company’s fifth consecutive quarter of record results, up from about $65 million in the first quarter of this year. And management has raised its 2026 revenue guidance twice, from an initial range of $225 million to $245 million in February to $280 million to $290 million today.
But every one of those figures stops at Dec. 31. Meanwhile, shares trade near $39 as of this writing, giving IonQ a market value of about $15.5 billion — about 54 times the midpoint of this year’s guided sales.
In other words, the years actually supporting the price are years management has never guided to. My prediction is that this changes on Tuesday.
Good guidance, short horizon
IonQ’s record as a forecaster is strong. The company delivered $130 million of revenue in 2025, up 202% year over year and 20% above the midpoint of its own guidance. That result, the company says, made it the first public quantum company to top $100 million in annual GAAP revenue.
What management has never done is put a year beyond the current one into its guidance. Even at the second-quarter report in early August, with the company’s $1.8 billion acquisition of chipmaker SkyWater Technology closed just days earlier, management went no further than the current year.
“Because we have operated as a combined company for less than a week, we need to integrate our operations before providing combined company revenue or EBITDA guidance,” said Inder Singh, IonQ’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer, on theearnings call
Singh did sketch a timeline, to be fair. Investors, he suggested, could get “color at Analyst Day perhaps, but certainly at the close of quarter.”
The full combined-company numbers, in short, may wait for the third-quarter report.
Why Tuesday?
The SkyWater deal practically demands a longer view. SkyWater generated $442 million of revenue in fiscal 2025, more than three times what IonQ itself produced that year. A multiyear frame lets management describe the much larger combined business on its own terms.
The technical roadmap already reaches years out, too. Not only has IonQ committed publicly to 800 logical qubits in 2027, up from a 2026 milestone of just 12, but it has also promised 2 million physical qubits supporting 80,000 logical qubits by 2030.
A company willing to publish engineering milestones four years ahead, while never guiding to what those machines could earn, has left an obvious gap. An investor day seems like the natural place to fill it.
The market has already picked a number
IonQ’s market value sits near $15.5 billion. At 15 times sales (a sales multiple usually reserved for the fastest-growing software companies), supporting today’s price takes about $1 billion of annual revenue. IonQ’s 2026 guidance midpoint is $285 million. Double that in 2027 and again in 2028, and revenue reaches about $1.1 billion — at which point the stock, at today’s value, would still trade at roughly 14 times sales. Put another way, a multiyear range that satisfies this market has to promise the doubling continues.
And profits can’t fill the gap in the meantime. IonQ’s non-GAAP (adjusted) EBITDA loss, a rough measure of underlying operating losses, more than tripled year over year in the second quarter, widening to about $120 million — larger than the quarter’s entire revenue.
Until that swings, the top line is what investors have to go on.
Ultimately, I expect a formal IonQ revenue number beyond 2026 to land on Tuesday, likely a multiyear frame for the combined company instead of a single 2027 figure. Of course, the honest risk to that call is Singh’s own timeline. But management has spent years beating its own forecasts, and its published roadmap already runs to 2030.
A multiyear number would be welcome. It would hand investors a guidance yardstick beyond the current year, something a $15.5 billion valuation arguably should have had all along.
It wouldn’t make me a buyer, though. At about 54 times this year’s guided sales, the growth stock’s price already assumes something spectacular. I’d stay on the sidelines for now.
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Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends IonQ. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.