IonQ reported third-quarter revenue of $173.8 million on November 5, up 336% year over year and far above the roughly $141 million consensus. It raised full-year 2026 guidance to $505 million to $515 million, from $450 million to $460 million three months ago and $280 million to $290 million before that. Remaining performance obligations more than doubled to $1.2 billion. GAAP net income was $564.0 million, or $1.42 a share. Every one of those headline numbers needs a second look before it means anything.
Start with the profit. IonQ’s adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $133.6 million and adjusted EPS was negative $0.29. The $564 million GAAP gain is, in the company’s own words, the non-cash mark-to-market of warrants. Warrants sit on IonQ’s balance sheet as liabilities, so when the stock falls the liability shrinks and the difference runs through the income statement as profit. The October equity raise, after the quarter closed, added seven-year warrants on another 100 million shares struck at $69.46, against a stock that closed at $26.43 on results day, so the swings get larger from the fourth quarter on. The worse the shares do, the better GAAP earnings look. The figure tells you about the share price, not the business, and it reverses the moment the stock recovers.
Then the growth rate. Revenue of $173.8 million splits into $90.3 million from the IonQ Platform, up 127%, and $83.5 million from SkyWater Foundry Services, the chip foundry IonQ acquired this year. SkyWater barely existed in IonQ’s year-ago numbers, so most of the gap between 127% and 336% is consolidation, not demand. The platform number is the one to model: about $360 million annualized, growing a little more than double year on year. Management’s full-year quantum computing revenue guide of 110% growth says the same thing. That’s still an exceptional rate for a company this size. It’s just a different company from the one the headline describes.
The backlog needs the same care. The $1.2 billion RPO includes unfunded portions of firm orders, government contracts where appropriations haven’t caught up, and SkyWater’s RPO was conformed to IonQ’s accounting policy in the quarter, so period comparisons are not clean. The orders behind it are real and diverse: a $33 million multi-product deal with SDT, a $25 million Superion 256 sale to Florida International University, the $28 million DARPA optical clock contract with a $30 million option, Stage C of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative with up to $300 million in program value, and NVIDIA’s decision to install a Superion 256 at its Accelerated Quantum Research Center as its first on-premises quantum computer. The NVIDIA order is the one that carries weight beyond its dollar value, because it puts IonQ hardware next to the GPU stack that every hybrid quantum-classical workload will run beside.
The moat argument for IonQ has shifted this year from qubits to vertical integration. With SkyWater it owns a US foundry, with Vector Atomic it sells unit-priced clocks to the Pentagon, with ID Quantique and Elisity it sells security products, and with the trapped-ion roadmap it keeps the computing franchise. Trapped ions still lead on gate fidelity and connectivity, and a US-owned fab is a real advantage for defense work under export and supply-chain rules. The cost is that IonQ is now a quantum company wrapped around a foundry, a clock maker and a network security vendor, and the multiple the market pays has to be set on the mix, not on the quantum dream. Elisity, which closed November 4 for $1.15 billion in stock plus up to $150 million in earnouts, adds to that mix again.
The stock closed at $26.43 on November 5, down 10.5% in a post-election sell-off across AI and chip names, and near the bottom of a 52-week range of $24.92 to $73.65. It rose 3% to 5.5% after hours on the print. It started 2026 at about $45 and priced its $2 billion offering at $40 only three weeks ago, so every buyer of that deal is under water. Market cap is about $12.7 billion. Against roughly $3.7 billion of pro forma cash, that’s an enterprise value near $9 billion, or about 18 times the midpoint of 2026 revenue guidance and roughly 25 times annualized platform revenue. The street is still Strong Buy with an average target around $62, but the targets are falling: Wedbush to $50, B. Riley to $75, Rosenblatt to $70, Morgan Stanley Hold at $43.
The base case, $26 to $34, assumes platform growth holds near 100% and the market keeps the stock in the high-beta AI basket where it trades with chips and rate expectations, not with its own results. The bull case, back toward the $40 offering price, needs a 2027 guide that implies platform revenue above $600 million and a clean conversion of DARPA Stage C into funded work. The bear case is cohort derating to $18 to $22: quantum names sold as a group on the next risk-off day, with IonQ’s 3.4 beta doing the rest, regardless of what the backlog says.
The number to watch next quarter is IonQ Platform revenue on its own line, because it’s the only figure in the report that isn’t moved by an acquisition, an accounting policy or the share price.