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Danny Fortson
This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by Adobe Acrobat Studio.
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Katie Prescott
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Danny Fortson
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This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by PwC.
Danny Fortson
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Danny Fortson
hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast with me, Danny Fortson.
Katie Prescott
And me, Katie Prescott. So Danny in the Valley, Silicon Valley. And Katie in the City, the city of London. Together again like it was always meant to be. How are you? Good to see you after such a long time.
Danny Fortson
So it's been a month and you've come back and you've got a new accessory.
Katie Prescott
I'm so glad you've noticed.
Danny Fortson
How could I not?
Katie Prescott
I have something to tell you about this.
Danny Fortson
Oh, did you just take a picture?
Katie Prescott
I did. I just flashed at you. Yes, these are. These are my new. My new meta glasses. The thick black rimmed glasses sported by Mark Zuckerberg.
Danny Fortson
Well, I was going to say they look thick as a glasses wearer since the age of five, I can Recognize a good set of bottle cap glasses when I see them.
Katie Prescott
And also I am minus eight and a half, so I'm also a glasses wearer. So I got my contacts in.
Danny Fortson
Yeah.
Katie Prescott
And these are, these are on top. And the lenses go dark in the sun.
Danny Fortson
Oh, no, no.
Katie Prescott
Yes.
Danny Fortson
I think you have to be at least 55 to wear those glasses.
Katie Prescott
I am loving them. I'm actually really enjoying them.
Danny Fortson
Explain why. Please explain why.
Katie Prescott
It's like I've come back to you 125% more me.
Danny Fortson
Wow.
Katie Prescott
And more intelligent. I have a little voice in my ear that I can ask questions to, can say, hey, Meta, what's the top tech news today?
Nicolo de Massi
Here are the top three tech news. First, France, Germany and the UK are willing to reinstate sanctions on Iran.
Danny Fortson
Right.
Nicolo de Massi
If it doesn't return to nuclear negotiations.
Katie Prescott
2025. Hey, Matta, enough.
Danny Fortson
Yes, chill, Metta. So I guess the question because like Zuckerberg, we all love to make fun of Mark Zuckerberg and he's showing up at every event now wearing these things, but he's been saying for a while like, this is the way we are going to interact with our technology. Like the end of the phone is nigh. And of course you have OpenAI working. They have just hired Johnny I to kind of create their own AI device. But do you think this is. Are you living in the future right now with these things on your face?
Katie Prescott
I'm not wearing them all the time. I have found it particularly useful with the kids. So if you're wandering around and you just want to take a picture like that. Although I'm yet to work out where the pictures go when you've taken them, I don't know what happens.
Danny Fortson
They go to straight to the metadatabase of humanity.
Katie Prescott
My pictures of sheep in Cornwall.
Danny Fortson
Yeah. They're not yours. You probably have to pay to get them.
Katie Prescott
So that's quite fun. And I do like the hands free aspect. I like being able to talk to something while I'm doing other things.
Danny Fortson
Right.
Katie Prescott
Yeah. And the novelty, it is fun.
Danny Fortson
And is it. Did Meta kind of. Are these a loner from Meta? Like, hey, check these out, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Katie Prescott
Yes. I should say Meta's very kindly sent me a pair of glasses to test out.
Danny Fortson
Well, I just feel bereft. I'm over here, just my old school, my analog glasses. If I talk to them, no one talks back to me.
Katie Prescott
But no one's watching you.
Danny Fortson
But I might just. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I just took a picture.
Katie Prescott
Where did it go?
Danny Fortson
It's the same place yours went.
Katie Prescott
I will work it out. I'm just such a Luddite. They're probably on the app. There's an app that connects with your phone to make them work. So, yeah, this is my new piece of fun for the week.
Danny Fortson
Wow. Well, you've been gone a month. You come back transformed.
Katie Prescott
Exactly.
Danny Fortson
Welcome back.
Katie Prescott
Thanks. It's nice to see you.
Danny Fortson
Yeah, likewise. We have a lot to catch up on, but we have a lot of big stories and of course, a big interview. Which you did.
Katie Prescott
Yeah, just this afternoon. We've had Nicolo de Massi, who's the boss of a listed Quantum company. One of our favorite subjects, US listed quantum company called IonQ, which has recently bought a British Quantum business based in Oxford, Oxford Ionics, for over a billion dollars. And they're currently trying to get that deal over the line because, as you can imagine, there are various national security issues when you start getting involved in Quantum. So we're going to hear from him shortly.
Danny Fortson
I'm going to have lots of questions because as we've previously discussed with all things Quantum, it's always feels like that's that thing over there that is just, as they say, five years away from being five years away. We are just like, is this even, like a real thing? And I'm just so skeptical. But I know that more and more money is being thrown at it.
Katie Prescott
Oh, my goodness. There's a lot of money in this company. And I can tell you that Mr. Damasi is very, very confident that it's going to be here a lot, a lot sooner than you might think.
Danny Fortson
Well, he's a tech CEO. I hope he's confident.
Katie Prescott
It's kind of, you know, it's an American tech CEO. Yeah, it's a genre.
Danny Fortson
Exactly. Well, I look forward to that. But first we have to start with some news. The first one being this big deal between the chip giant Nvidia and AMD and the US government. The US had banned the sale, obviously, of their most powerful chips to China under export controls, really, over national security concerns. This idea that, like, oh, we're going to sell our best chips to China and these can be used for all kinds of things, not least of which is hacking or even weapons, drones, et cetera.
Katie Prescott
And this has been going on for a while, the restrictions of US chip sales to China. But what was absolutely wild about the story this week was that Nvidia and AMD seem to have done this deal with the Chinese government whereby if they paid 15% of their revenues to the US treasury, they would be allowed to sell their chips. I mean, this kind of raised many eyebrows around the tech world, but not least the way that President Trump is conducting policy in this extraordinarily transactional way. It's like, are we prepared to put aside our national security concerns essentially, in exchange, exchange for cash. And if you're running a company, it makes it very, very difficult to know what you're supposed to be doing. When these sorts of deals can be struck with the government, it's just not normally how things work.
Danny Fortson
Yeah, no, it feels very, as you say, transactional, or almost like, you know, mob. Like, you know, oh, you want to do business here? Where's my cut?
Katie Prescott
There was obviously the deal that he did with Tim Cook not that long ago saying, okay, you know, you invest some money here in the States. Yeah, we'll think about wa. Leaving the tariffs that we were planning to put on your products.
Danny Fortson
Yeah. And so the weird thing is just the 180 degree turn that the administration has made, because in April, they're like, nope, we are issuing a blanket ban. You cannot sell our best chips or any chips to China. The national security concerns are too great. There's a whole part of the Pentagon, the defense establishment, who sees this as, this is like an arms race, like nukes, like whoever wins the AI race, who can build like these, you know, kind of autonomous drones that can do various scary things, the stakes are too high. We can't do it. That was April. Now we're in August. And they're like, yeah, yeah, you can. Now they, they're selling their H20s, Nvidia's H20s, which are not their top level chips. But as we've seen with Deep Seek and others, China can do a lot with not, you know, the top of the line stuff. Yeah. So four months after saying, you know, this is just too dangerous, now they're like, if we get a cut of your business, then, yeah, you know, feel free, go forth. And Prosper Jensen Huang of Nvidia was like, you know, in the White House. He was in Beijing. He was like, leading the negotiations. And his argument and the argument of David Sachs, who's the aizar, you know, billionaire investor out here, fellow podcaster. Yeah, yeah, from the all in podcast. His view all along has been like, let's build this whole new AI world on American technology. Because if the argument goes, if you cut out Nvidia, if you cut out amd, then into that breach steps Huawei, and it'll force the Chinese to kind of get better faster. Whether you buy that argument or not. It's not like they're going to stop trying.
Katie Prescott
That's exactly the argument that Jensen Huang's made, isn't it? Several times he said, look, you can put these blocks on us selling stuff, but it just means they're going to create their own things. And they've got fantastic technologists there. And the weird thing almost about this is the H20 chip was specifically designed by Nvidia for the Chinese market to conform with US restrictions. Which is back to our original point about ways of making policy. If you're a company and it takes you a long amount of time to develop something and you're working around a certain framework and then that can just change like that, it makes everything very difficult. I was speaking to some people in government here to find out what sort of impact all of this is happening on the UK semiconductor industry. And they were saying, at the moment, we're just not doing anything because things change so rapidly. There's almost no point issuing any guidance or coming up with any decisions.
Danny Fortson
No, exactly. It's the kind of classic strong views loosely held or whatever the saying may be. It's just like, nope, this is an existential threat to America. Are you going to give me 15%?
Farnoosh Tarabi
Sold.
Danny Fortson
Okay. I guess we're not too worried about that. I guess it's gonna be fine.
Katie Prescott
And the final kicker of this whole thing is that actually the Chinese don't want the chips.
Danny Fortson
That's so funny.
Katie Prescott
The Chinese government has come out and said, don't take those American chips. Chinese companies that's, you know, they might have American spyware in them.
Danny Fortson
I think that's also a little bit of face saving and a little bit of like, you know, kind of public theater. Be like, well, we don't want these chips anyway. But it is fascinating just because AI chips are like this huge strategic asset now in geopolitics, and they're just becoming increasingly right at the heart of these big bilateral negotiations and relations between the superpowers.
Katie Prescott
And that word that I can never pronounce, sovereignty. Sovereignty, yes. How do you say it? Should I ask Meta?
Danny Fortson
I'm gonna ask my glasses.
Katie Prescott
Hey, Meta, how do you pronounce sovereignty? Sovereignty is pronounced as ass. Did you hear that? Sovereignty.
Danny Fortson
There you go. Great, great pronunciation. That's actually impressive that it could hear the mangled version of sovereignty and then actually be like, no, that's sovereignty.
Nicolo de Massi
See?
Katie Prescott
125% more intelligent at least.
Danny Fortson
It's crazy. Well, speaking of devices, this story, I think is worth talking about, which the basic question is why does Apple suck?
Katie Prescott
You said it, not me.
Danny Fortson
Yeah, well, so we're like two and a half years, almost three years into this kind of AI race. Siri still sucks. Apple intelligence sucks. Apple is losing AI researchers to Meta and others. They're like kind of nowhere in this whole AI thing. And I know their whole business model is like, they're not first to market or second to market or third to market, they're just the best to market. They wait till they get the thing and they roll it out. But the reason I thought about all this is there's a chart doing the rounds out here around how much Apple has spent buying back shares in the past decade.
Katie Prescott
Go on.
Danny Fortson
They've spent 700 billion. God, $700 billion just buying their own shares to prop up their share price. So heading toward a trillion, they're probably going to spend about another hundred billion this year. And historically tech companies never paid a dividend, partly because they just didn't make enough money. And there's also this ethos around you spend all that money on R and D because this place is all about inventing the future. Buying back shares is almost like an admission of defeat. But Apple, as we know, has been this huge stock market darling, was for a long time the most valuable company in the world that's been lapped by Nvidia. But just this whole idea that. What would you say the last real product drop was from Apple.
Katie Prescott
Yeah, it's a very good point. I mean the last iPhone. I remember speaking about this on the pod actually. It didn't exactly make your jaw drop.
Danny Fortson
No, I did a little research on this, you know, not with my meta glasses, but with just my normal glasses on and just, I don't know if
Katie Prescott
meta glasses would talk about Apple, but
Danny Fortson
they, they came out, the AirPods were like the last product. Those came out in 2016. Almost a decade.
Katie Prescott
Well, they did away with cables, you know, that was a, that was a good thing.
Danny Fortson
Yeah, they had their VR goggles which were like a total flop. They had Project Titan, which was their self driving car thing which they killed before it even saw the light of day. So you're talking about like almost a decade in which they've spent money. They could buy like the top three or four companies in Britain. They could have bought Tesla when it was struggling. Any of these AI labs or whatever, they could have done a million things with that money. And instead they've just pushing up their share price.
Katie Prescott
In the meantime they're getting hit by various antitrust suits. I mean there's all sorts of things going on here in Europe about their payments ecosystem and over in the us, trying to break up their walled garden. But you can't easily bet against Apple. They have got a tie up with OpenAI, for example.
Danny Fortson
Yeah.
Katie Prescott
And they're only just starting to roll out Apple intelligence.
Danny Fortson
It'll be interesting to see how long they can continue to defy gravity. Obviously, they make so much money and Tim Cook's putting $600 billion into new plants across the US as part of this deal you mentioned with Donald Trump. You know, Apple's fine, but you just see what's going on in the market, see how quickly things are happening.
Katie Prescott
It's like there's an earthquake going on and Tim Cook's sitting still like Buddha in the middle of it all, just watching the rubble wave.
Danny Fortson
The dog in the meme with the burning house. Who's saying, everything's fine now? Of course, now that I've said that, next week they're going to come out with something that's like, oh, my God. But anyway, last story.
Katie Prescott
Yes.
Danny Fortson
If we're talking about sitting on your laurels or taking big swings,
Podcast Sponsor Voice / Narrator
this was.
Katie Prescott
I loved this. So this is Perplexity, the AI search startup, less than.
Danny Fortson
Less than three years old.
Katie Prescott
Three years old, said that it would like to buy Google Chrome for 34 and a half. 34 and a half billion dollars, so almost double what it's worth itself. And it said that it's got the investment in place to do this.
Danny Fortson
I'd like to be President of the United States. That doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Katie Prescott
An audacious move, a big swing, ambitious leap. Or as someone from inside the tech industry here said to me, a stunt, a very, very good stunt. Because of course, Google's in the process, potentially, of being broken up by a judge in the U.S. looking at the search market, we're found to have an illegal monopoly in search of. So Perplexity, saying, well, hey, we've got a great idea. We can just take Chrome off you and then you won't have a monopoly anymore. I don't know. I mean, what do you reckon? A stunt or something a bit more credible?
Danny Fortson
Yeah, I think the CEO, which I should mention, unless anything changes, he will be coming on the pod soon. So we can ask him this directly. I think he is basically trolling us all. Hopefully we can ask him this directly, but he is very good at keeping Perplexity, this little upstart in this extremely, extremely difficult world of like, LLMs, they've launched their own Their own browser called Comet. It's hard to kind of, you know, stay in the conversation, stay relevant. If you go back a few months, Perplexity again, this company that's supposedly worth $18 billion and I presume losing lots of money, as all startups do also it came out that yeah, yeah, we're looking at buying TikTok.
Katie Prescott
Yes.
Danny Fortson
Are you? With what money? You know, like. And so here they are like a few months later and again taking advantage of the moment and all of a sudden they're being mentioned as potential bidder for Chrome.
Katie Prescott
I've got a copy of the letter that they wrote to the boss of Google. It's called Project Solomon.
Danny Fortson
I love a good code name.
Katie Prescott
Dear Mr. Pichai, we are excited about the prospect of the possible transaction, the transaction between Google llc Google and Perplexity AI Inc. A Delaware corporation acquirer. We are or us pursuant to the terms and conditioning goes on anyway. So it's a term sheet from the boss of Perplexity.
Danny Fortson
I'm going to send one of these to mark Zuckerberg. Dear Mr. Zuckerberg, what for? You don't know me, where's glasses? But I got my own company and I think I can do what you're doing better. I look forward to buying it for $2 trillion.
Katie Prescott
Then all you need, which is what they've got here, is a kind of space for your signature at the bottom. Danny Forts and the Sunday Times just
Danny Fortson
hit the docusign and be like, I'll have my people call you people.
Katie Prescott
So yeah, it's a thing. I tried to get a response from Google yesterday. They were very, very tight lipped about it. I don't get the impression they're taking it particularly seriously. But it's got them some news coverage.
Danny Fortson
Yeah, exactly. But we should get to your, to the main event now.
Katie Prescott
Yeah, so as I said at the start, I sat down today with Nicolo de Massi, who's the boss of IonQ. It's a quantum computing business that was a spin out from Maryland and Duke University, set up in 2015 and then it listed through a SPAC in 2021, which is where Niccolo got involved with the business. So pretty early in terms of listing on the stock exchange as a quantum company. They work with Microsoft and Google. Amazon has a $37 million stake. Yeah, and a few months ago they bought Oxford Ionut for $1.1 billion, which is the deal that he's now trying to get over the line and he said in the past that he wants the company to be the Nvidia of the quantum world. So that kind of sets the scene for you about where he's, where he's coming at this from. But it's got an extraordinary valuation. So you know, for, for a company that's making $20 million of sales a quarter with an M, with a MER, it is valued at almost 13 billion billion with a B.
Danny Fortson
The world has, the world's lost its mind. This is crazy.
Katie Prescott
And we talk about that and I asked him to explain quantum computing for us as well.
Nicolo de Massi
You know, quantum computing is the next leg up in the computing revolution. And I would argue strongly that it is the largest, most impactful and final piece of the computing revolution. And in IonQ's case, we're doing that by trapping ions and performing calculations with nature's most fundamental, nearly perfect components, if you will.
Katie Prescott
And so what will quantum computing allow people to do that they can't do at the moment? How will it affect people?
Nicolo de Massi
They will grow the addressable problem set and they will add a lot of value in our case to unsolvable problems or problems that will take even the world's fastest supercomputer a century or even potentially a billion years to solve. And those tend to be applied science use cases, drug discovery, new materials, logistics, aerospace, of course, three letter agency and defense applications. That's just the tip of the iceberg in every computing evolution we've ever seen. Most of the value, I would argue, comes from emergent applications that people didn't hypothesize five years before. And Nvidia is a fantastic example and so is, by the way, the original mainframe business from 40 years ago. People thought there was just going to be an accounting usage for computers. And look at us now. So highly confident that quantum AI will turn out to be more energy efficient, faster, easy to regulate and controllable than the neural network weak AI models that people are spending a lot of capex on these days. But I do think that when Microsoft is recommissioning Three Mile island to power data sets, data centers, you have to ask yourself where this is going in the next five years. It can't be that the whole country's energy supply is going to be diverted onto the next bitcoin halving, as well as how to target better banner ads at you tomorrow morning.
Katie Prescott
So you're thought is that quantum computing will be a different way of approaching the AI revolution.
Nicolo de Massi
I think it will ultimately be that in the next few years it will actually work hand in hand with classical AI approaches. So we just announced a couple months ago, a fantastic demonstration of our quantum computers actually in partnership with Nvidia, AstraZeneca and Amazon Web Services. And we announced a 20x speed up for computational, you know, drug design approach, which basically turns a month of work into a day, day and a half. And that was actually delivered through a 648X speed up on the quantum algorithm piece of the problem. And then the classical workflows either side kind of brought that number down. But 20x is unambiguously quantum advantage. And I think what's going to happen is we're going to grow together and then at some point you'll start to want to run more jobs on GPUs than GPUs because of the fact that, that they're going to cost less ultimately and use less power.
Katie Prescott
Try and understand what IonQ does compared to other companies. There are lots and lots of businesses working in quantum trying to develop the computing power, trying to make it work, trying to make it viable. What do you do that's different?
Nicolo de Massi
Well, there's a reason why we have the largest business in the space and the largest market cap and we're the best capitalized. We've been at it from a research perspective the longest. Our founder, Chris Monroe in the mid-90s was the first physicist to demonstrate an empirical reality for theoretical postulates from Richard Feynman in the 70s. And we've honestly continually invested in what we believe is the path that has not just prevailed for the last 10, 20, 30 years, but is prevailing now and will continue to prevail. I think every revolution in the technology space always had more than one startup, but you tend to congeal around a liter, typically or 2. In the search industry it's sort of Google and Bing, and in the GPU space it's Nvidia and Broadcom. And so we think that, you know, the quantum computing space will be the same. We are, we believe, prevailing to date, our machines turned on first. So our machines have been on the public Google, Amazon, Microsoft, cloud for five years since our ipo. I think you're hard pressed to find anyone else who runs as publicly and has sold as many systems as us around the world and does as much useful work today. There are plenty of startups in every bit of the technology world that believe that in five years time they can catch up with a leader in that market. Graphcore was a good example of someone who five years ago said they were going to take Nvidia on, take Broadcom on, just you wait. That did not happen, that did not transpire and so leads in the tech industry.
Katie Prescott
They're still going?
Nicolo de Massi
No, they're still going, but I don't think anyone would bet on them to wipe the floor with Nvidia. Right. You know, or Broadcom for that matter. And so, you know, I expect people will continue to congeal around Ionq because we have the most market presence penetration. We've been at this the longest and we continue investing.
Danny Fortson
Let's pause there for a moment to talk about today's sponsor, Adobe Acrobat Studio.
Podcast Sponsor Voice / Narrator
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Danny Fortson
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This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by PwC.
Danny Fortson
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Nicolo de Massi
hi, this is
Farnoosh Tarabi
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Danny Fortson
I
Katie Prescott
guess the difficulty you've got though is it's not just one or two people. There are a number of companies in this space and some of the biggest players in the like Google and IBM who you're competing with.
Nicolo de Massi
Yeah. I mean, how many physicists does it take to change a light bulb? Is kind of the analogy I would give you. There are plenty of companies who are announcing progress on their roadmap, making huge claims. Yeah, huge claims. But candidly, they are generally delivering on prototypes that are analogous to the work that I and Q's founders did between 2001 and 2010.
Katie Prescott
And do you include Google and IBM in that?
Nicolo de Massi
I include. You know, I could go through them one by one if you would like. But you know, yes, we think that our machine today is superior to everyone else's and what it can do to deliver actual value. You know, if you remember that there are people working at large companies who don't have machines that even turn on yet once your power button depresses, you need to build a software business, an application business. You've got to manufacture, you've got to build market share, all the usual stuff. So, yeah, I fancy our chances because I find in many areas of challenging engineering, companies that lead year after year and quarter after quarter are much more likely to extend that than to get derailed, typically.
Katie Prescott
How did you get involved in the first place with IonQ? It was around the float. Is that right? 2021?
Nicolo de Massi
I've been following the quantum computing space since I was an undergraduate student at Cambridge University. A lot of my friends stayed in the space academically. I always believed, actually when I looked at progress rates in the early 2000s and the 2000s, that the 2020s were going to be when quantum computing took off. And so I was either a visionary or delusional visionary, depending on what your perspective is. In 2019, I ran a blank check company in the US called DNY Technology 3 and I started doing diligence on the quantum computing industry.
Katie Prescott
So a blank check company, meaning your kind of shell looking for something?
Nicolo de Massi
Yes, a spac, a special purpose acquisition company, or a cash shell, whatever you call it. Yeah. And we had $645 million. And I chose IonQ because I knew enough to be dangerous about this sector. And I believe then, I believe today, and I will always believe that the path IonQ has picked, which is lower space, lower energy, lower cost, runs at room temperature, doesn't need dilution, refrigerators would lead to faster engineering progress and commercialization. And in my experience, I have typically seen that the first commercializers have an enduring advantage. I would never invest in a path that says we'll commercialize five years later and hope to catch up.
Katie Prescott
But isn't the issue with quantum that it hasn't yet caught up. It's always something that we talk about as on the cusp of happening, and it just never seems to materialize.
Nicolo de Massi
I mean, we obviously don't see that at all in the sense that every time we add a logical qubit, we're doubling the compute space and we're delivering real world quantum advantage to a wide range of applications, logistics through to drug discovery, through to fraud, anomaly detection. And what I think people are missing is that quantum computing is going to advance at a doubly exponential rate. So it's not like Moore's law where every 18, 24 months you say, okay, the machine's doubled. What's actually happening in quantum computing is every time we add a logical qubit, we're doubling the compute space. And so, for example, our system last year was 36 algorithmic qubits. Our next one will be somewhere between 64 and 100. That will be probably 240 million times more powerful. And it's going to get more vertical after that. And the knock on effects of this are going to be a reshaping ultimately of the overall compute space. It'll also be a reshaping of what happens on the cybersecurity side of the equation. So the reason why we're in the quantum networking business is that cybersecurity, of course, is a huge challenge today already, but it's becoming, you know, even larger challenge. Not just because, you know, let's call them bad state actors, are more organized and are deliberately funding these exercises, but it's because classical computers are becoming more powerful. And quantum computers absolutely are making tremendous progress in our case, and probably China's making more progress in the black budget, if you will, than people are aware of.
Katie Prescott
That's certainly the vision that your shareholders are buying into looking at your share price. I mean, it's astonishing. It's gone up more than 500% this year, got valuation of about $12.5 billion, almost $13 billion. You've got this massive figure attached to the company, but then when you look at your sales, there are about, what, $20 million in the last quarter. Does that worry you, the mismatch between the two numbers? Do you wish that the hype around it was slightly less?
Nicolo de Massi
You know, we trade at a similar multiple to companies like Nvidia, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks.
Katie Prescott
Yeah, but they've got the sales perhaps to back up the numbers something like
Nicolo de Massi
75 times ish revenue for the year. And if you assume that we continue to grow at a healthy clip These multiples are nothing unusual in the tech space, actually.
Katie Prescott
Well, a lot of analysts are looking at you saying, well, we think there could be a bubble there.
Nicolo de Massi
I mean, they can look at each of these companies and say that. Right. I think that debate plays out every day when our stock trades. And the reality is there's more people that think that it's expanding upwards than expanding downwards on a daily basis. Right? Yeah, you can see that that is what a market is. I mean, we trade almost a billion dollars of stock a day and that price discovery happens daily.
Katie Prescott
But you can see, you know, the huge demand for AI and perhaps that's not really showing yet in the quantum space. I mean, if you're making the comparison
Nicolo de Massi
within, for example, we're earlier than the classical AI space and we're also not focused on where most of the AI classical value capture has been, which I would say is basically in advertising. So Google and Facebook are capturing AI value through banner ads. That is not what we're focused on.
Danny Fortson
Right.
Nicolo de Massi
We're focused on applied science, huge value add, hugely complex problems. But we're not focused on microsecond latency and turnaround times for monetizing people, for example. And that's what's going on in the class layout.
Katie Prescott
So when it comes to the $20 million of sales, who are your clients?
Nicolo de Massi
It is a mixture of government and let's call it FTSE 100 or Fortune 500 customers because they're relatively meaty ticket opportunities for us. Right. Not everybody has built a quantum network for themselves, but there's a number of telcos that have and financial institutions who are big customers. There are both government departments who are buying systems from us. And there are, of course, you know, large companies who are buying partial systems or cloud access or want early access to the next generation system. If you think about our computing business because of the double exponential growth, the reality is if you choose to run on an old system, you're at an almost existential disadvantage to your competitors as these systems keep becoming almost vertically more powerful. Right. So if you are competing hypothetically for the Stealth bomber 57 tender and you're Lockheed versus Boeing, losing, that is a $100 billion revenue problem. If you have an enormous grocery business and you want to optimize the routing and delivery of your trucks, that is a multimillion dollar a day savings opportunity. Or not. When you stand back and look at what we're delivering, impact on it is big problems where time matters.
Katie Prescott
You've talked about being the Nvidia of quantum before. Do you think Nvidia would buy you? Is that the aim?
Nicolo de Massi
I don't have an aim in the sense that we are a diversified public company. There is no controlling shareholder. Susquehanna bought a billion dollars of stock by investing in us after the July 4th weekend. Morgan Stanley Investment Partners, I think, has bought about a $700 million stake in the last week. My job as the chairman and CEO is to create shareholder value, run the business as well as I can, and make it, frankly, as expensive as possible for someone if they want to buy it. But our ambition, of course, is to become that $100 billion market cap company and become that trillion dollar market cap company, the quantum networking side of the house everybody in the world needs. So cybersecurity today, I think, is an insidious, challenging problem where data breaches impact everyone's life. And honestly, quantum computing, and the flip side of that, quantum networking is a solution that everybody needs today to stop the data breaches. I like to jokingly say you can spot our customers because they're the ones that are not in the news for data breaches. Quantum networking, quantum key distribution fundamentally allows you to tell if somebody is snooping on the line when you're transmitting data.
Katie Prescott
That's quite a good sales pitch, isn't it, Making people afraid of the.
Nicolo de Massi
I don't think it's a sales pitch. It's just a fundamental physical reality. Right. So classical encryption, you can never know if someone's broken it after they've effectively stolen your data. But quantum key distribution, you absolutely know if somebody's listing the line. I mean, in that category, we compete with probably one other player commercially, which is Toshiba, in the networking space, in the computing space. We run into IBM commercially, so we have two nice competitors on a global basis. We fancy our chances on both sides of the house. And we're a unique company because we do all of the quantum business in one place so we can sell networked quantum computers. And we believe the quantum Internet is actually where our company and where the world needs to go in the coming few years. And the quantum Internet will be quantum sensors capturing data, quantum computers processing it, and quantum networks transmitting that data safely.
Katie Prescott
Let's talk about your deal with Oxford Ionics, which caused a lot of excitement here in the UK. $1.1 billion value on the acquisition, I think.
Nicolo de Massi
Yep.
Katie Prescott
What was the rationale behind that? What attracted you to them?
Nicolo de Massi
Oxford Onyx was founded about six years ago, but Chris Balance has been working on effectively what his company's become for the better part of two decades. Since his Ph.D. dissertation. What we noticed as we spent more time together is that there was, is and continues to be this fantastic opportunity to take one plus one and not just make it two or three, but 20 or 30. And so we're actually viewing this transaction as a merger of two great technical roadmaps whereby we can effectively catapult ourselves even further ahead of anybody else that professes to be in the quantum computing industry. So we will have the leading unit economics, we will have the leading machine by the number of logical qubits, highest fidelity, best software stack. And there's an opportunity for IonQ on a combined basis with Oxfordics to just further extend the leadership we've created in the last five, 10, 15 years. I value the talent pool tremendously in this sort of Cambridge, Oxford supercluster, or triangle, however you want to put it. And the UK has been a leader in computing since the very beginning, I mean all 80, 90 years of it. And it's frankly a unique opportunity for both of our countries to come together and create a joint industrial policy to frankly beat the PRC at this.
Katie Prescott
You'll know better than anyone because you lived here for 17 years. Is it in the UK there is a huge amount of anxiety about British tech companies being bought by mainly US larger businesses and then what happens to them afterwards? Have you offered any reassurances about jobs or the sort of work that will continue in Oxford?
Nicolo de Massi
Yeah. So we are Not Nvidia spending 0.001% of our market cap to buy something. This is a massive bet. It's a bet the company deal for IonQ in the sense that we went all the way up to the line on as large a transaction as you can do without shareholder approvals and having to send out prospectuses and starting all over again with your ipo. It is a stock based merger. Chris Balance is an important part of our combined management team, as is his co founder Tom Hardy. We spend a lot of time thinking through how to grow headcount in Oxford to accelerate the combined roadmap as well as growing manufacturing here. This transaction I think stands apart from everything else that may have given people anxiety in the past in the sense that we are absolutely approaching this as a philosophically as a merger of equals. Even though the listing will remain on the nyse. The reality is, I think both sides see the cultural fit and also see the opportunity for us to cement, we would argue, a five year competitive advantage and lead over a player like IBM in the computing space.
Katie Prescott
How many jobs do you think that it'll end up creating in Oxford.
Nicolo de Massi
Well, I think that Oxford is a maybe 80 person organization today with a manufacturing center there. I bet we're going to be doubling tripling probably is what happens. The question's over. We're talking quarters or years here.
Katie Prescott
I imagine there's been some anxiety from the British government about your involvement or at least wanting to know a little bit more about your intentions. I mean, the quantum sector here has been hugely, hugely important. As I'm sure you know, they've invested billions in it over the past 20 years. And the sense is that it's one of the things that the UK is really, really good at when it comes to tech. What sort of conversations have you been having with government leaders about your plans?
Nicolo de Massi
Well, we're in that process at the moment. We're in the National Security Investment act review period.
Katie Prescott
Are you still going through it? Oh, I hadn't realized that.
Nicolo de Massi
Probably can't comment on what the conversations are, but they're all very positive.
Katie Prescott
Because Quantums are mandatory referral rights in terms of an acquisition of a quantum company means that you have to be referred to government to go through that process.
Nicolo de Massi
I think there's that combined with the fact that three letter agencies care about the sector. We're systematically important to US national security, UK national security, and I would argue to national economic security as well. What's unique about this transaction partnership merger is gives both nations an opportunity to congeal behind, I would argue, the clear commercial leader in the category. And together we're stronger because the US and UK government don't spend as much as China on quantum computing or networking. And China has shown tremendous progress, by the way, on the quantum security, cybersecurity and quantum key distribution business. I mean, we're doing QKD in space, ground to space, space to space, space to ground. China's already demonstrated that qkd, quantum key distribution, quantum cybersecurity security or quantum networking kind of interchangeable concepts. So the private sector has to step in here ultimately and make sure that our countries prevail here. Right.
Katie Prescott
So you really see this as a geopolitical race when you're thinking about the work that you do?
Nicolo de Massi
Absolutely. I think if the US and UK don't congeal behind an Auschwainics and I andQ I think the chances of the Five Eyes, the Western world, NATO, whatever you want to call it, prevailing in the sort of quantum space race decline dramatically.
Katie Prescott
Does it make it hard to do this sort of transaction under President Trump, under a leader who is looking to become more insular and bring everything far more into the States. Is it harder to do a transaction with a foreign company?
Nicolo de Massi
We haven't actually encountered any challenges from that perspective. I think the Trump administration as well as the Star administration both recognize that Quantum and AI are important industries. They both recognize they're important for national security and national economic security. And I think that I am cautiously optimistic that the US and UK will continue to have not just a special relationship, but a very special relationship on this front.
Katie Prescott
Let's end by talking about UK versus US tech and I'd like to talk about that with you because you've got this really interesting perspective of trying to buy a British business, but also you spend a lot of time here. So you understand, I think both worlds quite well. I talked about the anxiety earlier of British tech companies being bought by mainly US tech larger rivals. Another huge source of anxiety here and just feel like it's a very British thing, isn't it? To hand wring and get anxious about stuff is what's happening on the stock exchange and why few tech companies want to list here in the UK and why so many companies are thinking about moving their listings over to the US. As someone who's run a public listed company here in London, but also several out in New York, I just wonder what your perspective is and what it's like. What's the difference?
Nicolo de Massi
So, standing back, British real estate and British talent, everybody loves, right? People come here to houses and people come to both of these. I mean, look at British real estate and how it's performed the last 20, 30 years. Right. I mean, it's a global market. Globally interested people are less happy about
Katie Prescott
it if they live here, I can tell you.
Nicolo de Massi
Sure. But it's a global capital market that is effectively taking advantage of a scarce asset. Right. I think British computing talent is a globally interesting asset class, if you will, and the world wants access to that asset. So I think that people need to break down what is a global versus a local flow of capital or asset in the sense that you have world class assets in the UK. That does not mean that a 60 million, 65 million population country can have the same depth of capital as a global market.
Katie Prescott
So that is the big difference for you?
Nicolo de Massi
That's the big difference, Absolutely. The US has five or six times the population. The US public capital investor pool is even larger than all of Europe on a combined basis. To have an equivalent liquidity. When I andq trades half a billion to a billion dollars of volume every day on a 12 or $13 billion market cap. Now, that's liquid by anyone's definition, but it's more volume, I believe, than even the FTSE 10 combined trades on a daily basis on the LLC. And that's not the fault of regulators or the underlying companies. It's simply a factor of how many people are trading on that exchange and how much capital is behind that.
Katie Prescott
This is not something you can fix.
Nicolo de Massi
Well, if you had a single European exchange, I'm sure it would be as liquid as the NASDAQ or the nyse.
Katie Prescott
So would you consider running a business listed in London?
Nicolo de Massi
Again, having had both experiences, I'll consider anything. But the reality is liquidity does matter. Depth of capital markets does matter.
Katie Prescott
What you're saying is it's not surprising that lots of tech companies which are founded in the uk, when they look to list, they want to go to New York.
Nicolo de Massi
And I think that you should celebrate their success in tapping global capital markets. One of the things that always strikes me as different is the perspective that a nation's entrepreneurs and investors and employees and shareholders should only be from that nation. We raised money from Mubadala, the UAE sovereign wealth fund, when we were a private company and they were in our ipo. We don't get concerned for a company like Ionq that the Norwegians own a piece of it or the UAE does. Our talent's international.
Katie Prescott
As long as it's not the Chinese, for sure. For sure.
Nicolo de Massi
But my point though is nativism doesn't lead to success in a global financial or technology market. You have to absolutely want to be the very best at both all the time.
Katie Prescott
There you go. I told you he was optimistic.
Danny Fortson
Yeah, buoyant.
Katie Prescott
Tiggerish.
Danny Fortson
My thing, as I said at the top, I just don't quite understand the Quantum, like, what's gonna, you know, breakthrough. What is gonna turn this from like an interesting science project into, as he's saying, the thing that is the final stage of computing. And like, the number of people you talk to in Quantum are like, you know, we're taking on the billion year problems. I'm like, what is that? What does that mean?
Katie Prescott
The thing that brought it home for me? And he talked about cybersecurity. There was the National Cybersecurity center here issuing a warning, saying that Quantum is going to be a massive issue for companies and they need to start getting ready for it. And that was one of the first times that I've seen that spread out as a more widespread issue. Because, yes, you can see why companies like the defense companies he mentioned or governments might be looking at it, but how it goes beyond a company that's selling $20 million of products to something which is. Is more widely used. And I know. I mean, he was obviously making the point that perhaps the ratio is the same as Nvidia's, but you can see everybody wanting Nvidia's products. And so that feels slightly more realistic.
Danny Fortson
Yeah. And I get. I mean, I think that's the point. He's kind of damning his own company with faint praise, being like, well, we are the market leader and we're making $80 million a year. Or, sorry, we're bringing in $80 million a year.
Katie Prescott
Yeah, that's revenue.
Danny Fortson
So you're kind of like, oh, okay.
Katie Prescott
But his argument is, we're the market leader. We were first at the table. We understand what we're doing. We've got big backers, we've got really good scientists involved. And so when this wave starts, we're in a good place to jump on it.
Danny Fortson
Yeah. And that may prove true. And again, I think that industry just has a marketing problem. It has a nomenclature problem. When he's talking about, oh, yeah, the QKDs. And every time we add a logical qubit, I'm like, what does that mean?
Katie Prescott
I should have been wearing my better glasses in the interview, actually. It could have translated.
Danny Fortson
Exactly. Exactly. And so it's still. It just still feels like it's in the lab or just coming out of the lab. And it's like guys in white coats. And I'm like, okay, cool, this is an amazing thing. But, like, what's the. There, there? And I'm sure I'm missing obvious things, but it's just like when you start talking about logical qubits and whatnot, you're like, you've lost me.
Katie Prescott
You say that it's got a marketing problem, but then you look at the share price, and I think a lot of people love the logical qubit. And a lot of people really want to buy into this quantum revolution.
Danny Fortson
Wait a minute. You just produced another logical qubit by ding, ding, ding.
Katie Prescott
Because people want exposure to these businesses, you know, a little bit like they do the AI industry, even if they don't understand them because they feel the promise is there. And there aren't that many listed quantum companies.
Danny Fortson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. And like, every time you talk to one of the folks in the space, they're like, this is going to change everything. This is going to be like a real step change for humanity. There are huge dangers because quantum encryption and decryption and all of that stuff could have huge implications, as he said, for national security. But it all still feels to me very theoretical.
Katie Prescott
Yeah, it makes doing an interview like that also quite difficult because I think it's so techy that it's quite hard to challenge someone when you're not steeped in it.
Danny Fortson
And it's all shrouded in mystery too, which again I think is part of the marketing stick of just like, well, you know, three letter agencies are really, really concerned about this. Oh, oh goodness.
Katie Prescott
Do you think it doesn't exist? Is it like a made up thing?
Danny Fortson
Vaporware. Show me a qubit. But I'll show you my superposition anyway. Well, welcome back. Good. Very good to have you back.
Katie Prescott
I see.
Danny Fortson
And.
Katie Prescott
And see you next week.
Danny Fortson
Indeed. Bye bye. Bye.
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Episode Title: The Race for Quantum Supremacy
Date: August 14, 2025
Hosts: Danny Fortson (San Francisco) & Katie Prescott (London)
Main Guest: Nicolo de Massi, CEO of IonQ
This episode dives into "The Race for Quantum Supremacy," exploring the geopolitics, investment frenzy, and real-world applications of quantum computing. Hosts Danny Fortson and Katie Prescott break down the latest headlines in technology, discuss the shifting power dynamics of the AI and chip industries, and feature an in-depth interview with Nicolo de Massi, CEO of quantum computing firm IonQ.
(Start – 06:00)
(06:00 – 12:30)
(12:30 – 16:20)
(16:20 – 19:43)
(19:47 – 51:09)
This rich, candid discussion captures the current state of quantum technology—poised between hype and reality, with massive stakes riding on who will lead the next computing revolution.