IonQ reports big Q4 revenue beat and better-than-expected sales guidance - Sherwood News

The trapped-ion quantum computing company just reported quarterly results.IonQ is rising in after-hours trading after posting much better-than-expected Q4 sales.For Q4, the trapped-ion quantum computing company reported:Revenue of $61.9 million (estimate: $40.38 million).An adjusted loss per share of $0.20 (estimate: a $0.23 loss).Sales guidance was also robust. For Q1, IonQ expects revenues to come in between $48 million and $51 million (estimate: $37.08 million) and full-year sales to range from $225 million to $245 million (estimate: $195.8 million).The midpoint of management’s call for adjusted EBITDA between -$310 million and -$330 million is modestly better than the consensus projection of -$326.2 million.IonQ, the largest pure-play quantum computing company by market cap, was down roughly 60% off its October closing high heading into this report.The firm recently landed a missile defense contract, with the opportunity to get a piece of a $151 billion program.The market clearly loves it. Jack Dorsey’s decision to axe some 4,000 workers has kicked off what is on track to be Block’s best day in the stock market in over three years. The takeaways from analysts who have followed the stock — down about 80% from its August 2021 peak — are a bit more nuanced:Evercore ISI: “Mgmt is explicitly redesigning Block as an ‘AI-native’ organization — embedding automation and efficiency tools across product development, underwriting, operations, and customer interfaces. The financial implications are significant: FY26 Adjusted Operating Income guidance of $3.2B (26% margin) sits materially above mgmt’s prior expectations at the Investor Day just a few months ago, signaling confidence that AI-driven efficiencies can expand margins structurally while sustaining or potentially accelerating product velocity.”Morgan Stanley: “Cutting 40% of employees (to ~6,000 from ~10,000) encapsulates XYZ’s undertaking that it is now prepared to replace human labor with compute power. We certainly view it as an audacious move by the management, but one that is not without preparation... The reduced headcount should now drive a marked improvement in the gross profit/employee metric, which we expect will justify expanded valuation premium.”Piper Sandler: “Dorsey characterized the move as a proactive step to make way for AI related productivity gains. The cost saves from lower headcount drive a $500M increase in Block’s Adjusted EBIT guidance for 2026 — now $3.2B vs. $2.7B at investor day just 3 months ago. Bottom line, while the right sizing from XYZ is being well received by investors and should boost short-term profitability, it seems like an extreme step, and we remain skeptical of XYZ’s longer term growth profile.”Citi: “Several times during the Q&A, the sell side probed management’s comfort with carrying out the major headcount reduction in parallel with more extensive and more effective GenAI use over a roughly two quarter timespan. On the one hand, Block seemed confident in the organization’s ability to adapt and rise to the challenge, but on the other hand, we are aware that a 40% reduction in heads should generate many empty seats. While we believe it more likely for XYZ to succeed here, we think that more reassurance can surface should XYZ continue to do as they plan.”RBC Capital: “The main question from investors thus far — is this just legacy bloat or real AI enhancements — only time will tell, but it feels like a combination of both... While AI efficiencies no doubt played a key role in a reduction in force of this magnitude, we also believe XYZ was moving in a direction to materially shrink the organization.”Evercore ISI: “Mgmt is explicitly redesigning Block as an ‘AI-native’ organization — embedding automation and efficiency tools across product development, underwriting, operations, and customer interfaces. The financial implications are significant: FY26 Adjusted Operating Income guidance of $3.2B (26% margin) sits materially above mgmt’s prior expectations at the Investor Day just a few months ago, signaling confidence that AI-driven efficiencies can expand margins structurally while sustaining or potentially accelerating product velocity.”Morgan Stanley: “Cutting 40% of employees (to ~6,000 from ~10,000) encapsulates XYZ’s undertaking that it is now prepared to replace human labor with compute power. We certainly view it as an audacious move by the management, but one that is not without preparation... The reduced headcount should now drive a marked improvement in the gross profit/employee metric, which we expect will justify expanded valuation premium.”Piper Sandler: “Dorsey characterized the move as a proactive step to make way for AI related productivity gains. The cost saves from lower headcount drive a $500M increase in Block’s Adjusted EBIT guidance for 2026 — now $3.2B vs. $2.7B at investor day just 3 months ago. Bottom line, while the right sizing from XYZ is being well received by investors and should boost short-term profitability, it seems like an extreme step, and we remain skeptical of XYZ’s longer term growth profile.”Citi: “Several times during the Q&A, the sell side probed management’s comfort with carrying out the major headcount reduction in parallel with more extensive and more effective GenAI use over a roughly two quarter timespan. On the one hand, Block seemed confident in the organization’s ability to adapt and rise to the challenge, but on the other hand, we are aware that a 40% reduction in heads should generate many empty seats. While we believe it more likely for XYZ to succeed here, we think that more reassurance can surface should XYZ continue to do as they plan.”RBC Capital: “The main question from investors thus far — is this just legacy bloat or real AI enhancements — only time will tell, but it feels like a combination of both... While AI efficiencies no doubt played a key role in a reduction in force of this magnitude, we also believe XYZ was moving in a direction to materially shrink the organization.”The upstarts participating in the disruptive industry of today as well as the speculative trades that mark the industries of the future are getting crushed on Friday.It’s a sign of the creeping investor revolt against the capex binge.The poster child for the move is CoreWeave, which is sinking after reporting Q4 capex figures that were larger than expected along with a 2026 investment budget that also surprised to the upside.Neoclouds and data center companies like Nebius, IREN, Applied Digital, and Cipher Mining are also getting whacked. So too are the quantum computing companies: IonQ, D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, and Infleqtion.What’s the common link between these two things?Well, as we’ve discussed, speculative stocks tend to have common owners and trade in a relatively correlated fashion. And once again, this simultaneous swoon is coinciding with a perceived escalation in AI credit risk.These smaller AI companies that have effectively bet their existence on this boom and the willingness of capital markets to fund their expansion plans would have the most to lose if either demand or access to credit shrinks. And, of course, the latter would impact other companies in nascent industries that need capital to grow.The private credit industry, which has been broadly overweight software companies in their lending activities, is coming under severe pressure as those firms face competition from AI tools. Block’s job cuts, regardless of any previous mismanagement CEO Jack Dorsey is willing to cop to, will do little to allay fears that software executives may take dramatic actions to grapple with the impacts of this emergent technology.Meanwhile, the source of that disruption — AI — is also continuing to suck in a lot of capital without much in the way of returns. It feels like the credit market simultaneously doesn’t want to fund software because of the AI disruption threat and doesn’t want to fund upstart AI firms because of the lack of visibility into free cash flow generation. Not great, Bob!Oracle, the large-cap stock most used as a barometer for AI credit risk, enjoyed a sharp improvement in its perceived creditworthiness after management said on February 1 that about half their funding needs this year would come from equity, rather than fully from debt. Now, its five-year credit default swap spreads are poised to close at their widest level since 2009.Netflix opened sharply higher Friday, after it withdrew from the takeover battle for Warner Bros. Discovery, ceding the ground to Paramount Skydance. You don’t have to be much of a market sleuth to see that Wall Street never liked the idea of Netflix scooping up the assemblage of media and movie properties for a whooping $83 billion price tag.The stock slumped both on the day Netflix submitted a bid and the day it entered into an acquisition agreement with Warner Bros. Now, on the back of Netflix declining to raise its bid and dropping out of the race to acquire Warner Bros., the streaming platform’s shares are having their best day since the market’s bounce back from the April tariff tantrum.Driving the gains are what HSBC analysts call its “graceful exit” from the WBD brouhaha:“A positive turn of events in our view, as we believe NFLX’s withdrawal from the race will leave it free to refocus on its business, while its closest competitors grapple with long and distracting regulatory approval and merger integration processes, and with Paramount Skydance saddled with sizable deal debts. And one must not forget the $2.8 bllion breakup fee (around 20% of NFLX 2026 estimated EPS) that NFLX will now be owed from WBD for choosing to go with another suitor.”You don’t have to be much of a market sleuth to see that Wall Street never liked the idea of Netflix scooping up the assemblage of media and movie properties for a whooping $83 billion price tag.The stock slumped both on the day Netflix submitted a bid and the day it entered into an acquisition agreement with Warner Bros. Now, on the back of Netflix declining to raise its bid and dropping out of the race to acquire Warner Bros., the streaming platform’s shares are having their best day since the market’s bounce back from the April tariff tantrum.Driving the gains are what HSBC analysts call its “graceful exit” from the WBD brouhaha:“A positive turn of events in our view, as we believe NFLX’s withdrawal from the race will leave it free to refocus on its business, while its closest competitors grapple with long and distracting regulatory approval and merger integration processes, and with Paramount Skydance saddled with sizable deal debts. And one must not forget the $2.8 bllion breakup fee (around 20% of NFLX 2026 estimated EPS) that NFLX will now be owed from WBD for choosing to go with another suitor.”OpenAI has finalized a blockbuster $110 billion funding round, which values the company at $730 billion, not including the money raised. Per the ChatGPT maker’s announcement, this investment includes $50 billion from Amazon, $30 billion from SoftBank, and $30 billion from Nvidia.In a separate press release, OpenAI detailed the startup’s new multiyear partnership with Amazon, in which the tech giant will initially invest $15 billion then $35 billion in the coming months when “certain conditions are met,” reportedly when OpenAI goes public or achieves building “artificial general intelligence.” Beyond serving as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, AWS is also expanding its existing $38 billion agreement with the ChatGPT maker to $100 billion over eight years, with OpenAI committing to consume ~2 gigawatts of AWS’s Trainium capacity.In a separate press release, OpenAI detailed the startup’s new multiyear partnership with Amazon, in which the tech giant will initially invest $15 billion then $35 billion in the coming months when “certain conditions are met,” reportedly when OpenAI goes public or achieves building “artificial general intelligence.” Beyond serving as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, AWS is also expanding its existing $38 billion agreement with the ChatGPT maker to $100 billion over eight years, with OpenAI committing to consume ~2 gigawatts of AWS’s Trainium capacity.Dell’s across-the-board beat of key earnings metrics delivered after the close of trading Thursday is receiving rave reviews from Wall Street analysts. Here’s a smattering of the chatter, much of which focused on Dell’s surprising ability to pass a parabolic price surge in memory chip prices through to customers: Bernstein Research: “Management highlighted record AI server orders of $34.1B and $9.5B of AI server shipments, exiting the quarter with a record $43B AI backlog. Importantly, Dell characterized enterprise as the fastest growing portion of AI portfolio and pipeline, with enterprise AI up both in absolute dollars and as a mix for both shipments and orders, supported by a growing customer base of 4,000+ AI customers and expanding use cases beyond early pilots.”Mizuho: “Key points: 1) Fiscal 2027 AI server revenues guided up 100% y/y to ~$50B (WELL ABOVE consensus ~$36B), 2) Memory cost impact limited with AI Server operating margin reiterated at mid-single-digit percentage better than feared, with margins stabilizing post-Jan price increases.”Citi: “An exceptional beat+raise. 4Q revenues upsided expectations (+39% year-over-year) exceeding the top end of their guide while EPS was also higher (+45% year-over-year) on higher margins. Guide also significantly upsided expectations fiscal 2027 estimated revenue up ~25%+, AI revenues to double (core server/storage MSD, CSG 1%) and EPS up 26%, with gross margins ex-AI showing improvement.”Barclays: “Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) growth was significant — up 73% year-over-year reaching a record $19.6B revenue in the Q, marking eight consecutive quarters of double digit growth. Management expects the strong growth momentum to continue and guided to a doubling of ISG revenues in Q1. AI servers growth accelerated tremendously with $34B of AI server orders in Q4 (up from $12B the prior Q), leading to a total of $64B orders for the fiscal year, which represents a 6x increase year-over-year.”Morgan Stanley: “Our fiscal 2027 EPS estimate of $10.97 remains well below management’s $12.90. Why? Because we struggle to conceptually understand how — excluding AI servers — DELL can significantly increase prices multiple times through the year, drive over 200 basis points of year-over-year gross margin expansion, and see limited demand elasticity. That’s what the guidance implies.”Bernstein Research: “Management highlighted record AI server orders of $34.1B and $9.5B of AI server shipments, exiting the quarter with a record $43B AI backlog. Importantly, Dell characterized enterprise as the fastest growing portion of AI portfolio and pipeline, with enterprise AI up both in absolute dollars and as a mix for both shipments and orders, supported by a growing customer base of 4,000+ AI customers and expanding use cases beyond early pilots.”Mizuho: “Key points: 1) Fiscal 2027 AI server revenues guided up 100% y/y to ~$50B (WELL ABOVE consensus ~$36B), 2) Memory cost impact limited with AI Server operating margin reiterated at mid-single-digit percentage better than feared, with margins stabilizing post-Jan price increases.”Citi: “An exceptional beat+raise. 4Q revenues upsided expectations (+39% year-over-year) exceeding the top end of their guide while EPS was also higher (+45% year-over-year) on higher margins. Guide also significantly upsided expectations fiscal 2027 estimated revenue up ~25%+, AI revenues to double (core server/storage MSD, CSG 1%) and EPS up 26%, with gross margins ex-AI showing improvement.”Barclays: “Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) growth was significant — up 73% year-over-year reaching a record $19.6B revenue in the Q, marking eight consecutive quarters of double digit growth. Management expects the strong growth momentum to continue and guided to a doubling of ISG revenues in Q1. AI servers growth accelerated tremendously with $34B of AI server orders in Q4 (up from $12B the prior Q), leading to a total of $64B orders for the fiscal year, which represents a 6x increase year-over-year.”Morgan Stanley: “Our fiscal 2027 EPS estimate of $10.97 remains well below management’s $12.90. Why? Because we struggle to conceptually understand how — excluding AI servers — DELL can significantly increase prices multiple times through the year, drive over 200 basis points of year-over-year gross margin expansion, and see limited demand elasticity. That’s what the guidance implies.”