Maryland’s IonQ acquired Toronto-based Entangled Networks

Today, College Park, Maryland quantum leader IonQ announced its first-ever acquisition.

The DMV company acquired the operating assets of Entangled Networks, a Toronto, Canada-based startup founded in 2021. Entangled Networks specialized in enabling computing for multiple quantum processors, including those that are distributed. Through the deal, the Entangled team will become the staff of IonQ Canada, the quantum pioneer’s first outpost in the country.

According to IonQ, this acquisition supports the company’s plans to develop full quantum systems that are capable of supporting future quantum networks. The company is currently building quantum networking hardware, an early version of which IonQ anticipates demonstrating later this year.

Supercomputers are traditionally created by including as many cores as possible onto a single processor before networking the processors and computers together. Applications are found in multiple cores and processors to help spread out the workload, and networking helps the processors communicate.

IonQ said that for quantum computing to meet its potential and scale, it needs to follow a similar model and idea: building a quantum computer from multiple processors networked together. But, according to the Maryland company, quantum computers allow entanglement, which is when a group of particles are either generated, interact with each other or are so close together that the state of each particle can’t be described independently of the others. This forms a single larger quantum computer that uses the network for computation instead of communicating.

“In acquiring the Entangled Networks assets, IonQ will benefit from not only some of the top experts in quantum architecture but also from software tools that we intend to use to drive substantial speed-ups in our system performance,” explained Peter Chapman, IonQ’s President and CEO, in a statement. “We are also excited about the opening of IonQ Canada. This expansion will help us better support the thriving quantum computing community in Canada and further our collaborations with IonQ partners and customers.”

IonQ went public in 2021 following a merger with dMY Technology Group Inc. III, a special purpose acquisition company, raising $635 million. It describes its IonQ Aria hardware as the most powerful quantum computer in the world, with a 25 algorithmic qubits capability. IonQ Aria is available to the public through Microsoft Azure and Dell Hybrid Quantum Computing Solutions. It’s partnered its software with Airbus, Hyundai Motors and other non-quantum-focused companies.