Jensen Huang's Quantum Support Boosts IonQ's Growth Plans: Nvidia Partnership, Oxford Ionics Deal Lead Needham To Reiterate 'Buy'

IonQ Inc. (NASDAQ:IONQ) is solidifying its stronghold in the quantum computing space as a recent sector endorsement by Jensen Huang, partnership with Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA), and the acquisition of Oxford Ionics have drawn investor attention to the company.

What Happened: Its recent definitive agreement to acquire U.K.-based Oxford Ionics for $1.075 billion will “meaningfully accelerate IonQ’s technology roadmap,” said Needham.

This strategic move propels IonQ towards ambitious targets: a 256 physical qubit system by 2026, 10,000 physical qubits by 2027, and a staggering 2 million physical qubits by 2030, all while achieving increasingly higher logical accuracy.

Needham highlights that these targets will be achieved as IonQ leverages Oxford’s ion-trap technology and uses its own control software, networking stack, and manufacturing capabilities

Needham & Company has reiterated its “Buy” rating on IonQ, maintaining a $50 price target in a note dated June 11.

This comes as Nvidia CEO Huang turned back on his January statement, and said quantum computing is reaching a pivotal “inflection point,” during his keynote speech at a company event being held jointly with the VivaTech 2025 conference in Paris.

He also added that quantum computing is poised to “solve some interesting problems” globally in the coming years.

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Why It Matters: The path to practical quantum advantage increasingly involves hybrid quantum-classical computing, and IonQ has demonstrated its leadership in this domain after a partnership with Nvidia.

It is already working on hybrid computing, leveraging the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform alongside its IonQ Forte hardware. This collaboration illustrates the seamless integration of quantum processing units (QPUs) with Nvidia’s accelerated computing capabilities.

Further solidifying this synergy, IonQ, in partnership with AstraZeneca PLC (NASDAQ:AZN), Amazon.com Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Nvidia, recently achieved a remarkable 20 times speedup in a critical drug development workflow.

Price Action: Shares of IonQ ended 0.10% lower on Wednesday, and they were down 1.81% in premarket on Friday. It has fallen 7.89% on a year-to-date basis and surged 399.37% over a year.

About seven analysts covering IonQ are tracked by Benzinga. They have a consensus target price of $40 apiece, with a ‘hold' rating. The targets range from $30 to $50, and the recent ratings by Needham, Benchmark, and Morgan Stanley imply a 10.91% upside for the stock.

Benzinga Edge Stock Rankings shows that IonQ had a stronger price trend over the short, medium, and long term. Its momentum ranking was solid; however, its value ranking was poor at the 3.20th percentile. The details of other metrics are available here.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSE:SPY) and Invesco QQQ Trust ETF (NASDAQ:QQQ), which track the S&P 500 index and Nasdaq 100 index, respectively, were lower in premarket on Thursday. The SPY was down 0.51% at $598.30, while the QQQ declined 0.54% to $529.51, according to Benzinga Pro data.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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