Three Quantum Computing Hardware Acquisitions – What’s Behind Them?
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By Doug Finke In the recent months, we have reported on three quantum hardware acquisitions including IonQ/Oxford Quantum Circuits in September, Google/Atlantic Quantum in October, and just this week D-Wave/Quantum Circuits Inc. Sometimes technology acquisitions are made for financial reasons, reduction of costs, broaden sales channels, or to get into new markets. But in these specific cases none of those were the driving factor. From GQI’s vantage point, we believe the key factors for these three acquisitions had to do with talent and technology pivots. Talent Acquihiring is a strategic technique for rapidly expanding an organization’s talent pool. Rather than the slow, traditional process of recruiting key employees individually, this approach allows a company to secure a high-performing team by acquiring their entire firm at once. This strategy is particularly effective in specialized fields like quantum processor engineering, where the global talent pool is extremely limited. Relying solely on new graduates is often unfeasible, as the time required for them to complete their education would jeopardize aggressive development schedules. In the cases mentioned, the target companies possessed exceptional technical expertise, ensuring they will contribute significantly to the acquiring organization’s goals.
Technology Pivots What may not have been discussed in the non-technical media is that all three of these acquisitions will potentially result in some form of a technology pivot. All of the acquirers already had on-going development programs in a closely related technology. But the acquirers all realized that the target companies could bring them slightly different technical elements that will take the combined entity farther than the previous approach. Certainly, the combined entity will work to utilize the best technical elements from each side. This could include things like mechanical packaging, software, control electronics, etc. But in each of these cases, the acquiring companies are bringing in changes at the quantum plane, the lowest segment in GQI’s quantum stack model. This is resulting in companies making significant changes to their roadmaps as they assess the impact of the introduction of these new technical elements. We will discuss the technologies involved in more detail for each company in the following sections. IonQ/Oxford Ionics A key difference between IonQ’s previous approach and the one taken by Oxford Ionics lies in the qubit control. Whereas, IonQ’s previous approach controlled the qubits via laser pulses, Oxford Ionics approach uses microwaves. This will improve the gate fidelity with early tests already showing 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity as well as allow them to move from 1D linear traps to a denser 2D quantum fabric. The company plans to start offering quantum computers utilizing this new technology later in 2026 with a planned roadmap that extends to 2 million physical qubits by 2030. Google/Atlantic Quantum With superconducting qubits, there are different variants classified as transmons and fluxonium qubits. Transmons have been the historical leader and is currently utilized by IBM, Google, Rigetti and several others. Transmons were adopted earlier because they are easier to construct and can be controlled with standard microwave equipment. However, more recently, some companies including Atlantic Quantum have been pursuing fluxonium qubits. Although they are more complicated to fabricate and require additional circuitry, they offer the potential of having much a higher coherence time (on the order of milliseconds) as well as more resistance to noise. This can potentially provide faster operation and more accurate results. In addition, other researchers have explored hybrid approaches that combine fluxonium qubits with transmon tunable couplers. So far, Google has been mum about how much of the fluxonium technology they will adopt. But if they do so, it would be a change from the transmon approach they have been using for many years. D-Wave/Quantum Circuits Inc. At their Qubits Conference in October 2021, D-Wave announced that it was starting development of a gate based quantum computer to augment their line of quantum annealing processors. This makes sense since there are some quantum algorithms, such as Shor’s algorithm or some computational chemistry algorithms, that cannot be run on an annealer that would require a gate-based machine. And D-Wave’s strategy is to provide the fullest suite of solutions to capture the broadest possible market. At the time, they announced they would be using fluxonium-based superconducting qubits, while still leveraging many of their innovations in packaging, cryogenic control, and other elements from their annealing designs. But in this week’s announcement, D-Wave announced the acquisition of Quantum Circuits Inc. (QCI) and provided a roadmap for their upcoming gate-based product line for the next few years. The QCI technology is based upon dual-rail qubits which provide built-in error detection. Again, D-Wave indicated they will leverage many elements of technology from their annealing designs as mentioned above, but it does seem they will no longer be pursuing fluxonium qubits in favor of of QCI’s dual-rail qubits. Conclusion As we mentioned in our article last month about 2026 predictions, GQI does expect an increase in market consolidation within the quantum ecosystem. There are many other factors driving this, but one shouldn’t neglect the importance of talent and opportunities to improve upon their technology. The market is getting increasingly competitive, and companies need to maintain a close eye on what is happening outside their company and consider obtaining externally any technology that will put them in a better position.
Global Quantum Intelligence (GQI) maintains a series of State of Play documents that keeps detailed track of all aspects of quantum technology and who is doing what. Contact them to learn how to obtain these items and ensure you are up to date on the competitive environment. January 10, 2026