LTW 2025: Interview with IonQ’s CEO Niccolo De Masi

Drawing more than 45,000 participants across three action-packed days, London Tech Week was abuzz with fresh government commitments, groundbreaking innovations and a flurry of announcements.

Billed as the country’s biggest tech event, London Tech Week took place from 9 to 11 June 2025 at London Olympia.

The event launched with a keynote speech by Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who was soon joined on stage by Nvidia Co-Founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

Niccolo De Masi is CEO of IonQ, which sets out to “build the world’s best quantum computers to solve the world’s most complex problems”.

“We're the only company in the world that does both quantum computing and quantum networking. Both of them are kind of equally large and important pieces of our business,” he explains.

Here, he speaks to Technology Magazine at London Tech Week.

Quantum is a massive talking point at the moment. What’s exciting you the most about working in quantum space?

We’re at this inflexion point where we’re starting to do really powerful useful stuff for enterprise applications and companies. 

We’ve recently announced a 20x speed up with AstraZeneca and partnership with Nvidia and AWS — that is a classical and quantum outcome — and it really is game changing. 

We’re making stuff happen in days instead of months and we're just getting started.

We’re going to go from 36 qubits to millions of qubits in the next three to five years. Huge power is coming. Many, many different verticals will be positively impacted. 

There’s almost no part of applied science that won’t be positively impacted by our quantum computers. 

How important do you think it is in the tech space — specifically in quantum — that there is cross-company, public and private collaboration?

We’re in the business of building the strongest, deepest and broadest ecosystem — that’s why we do quantum networking and quantum computing. It’s why we have many global offices and it's why we partner in each geography, continent and territory with public and private players. 

It’s really important that people learn on our quantum systems and stay on them. So, whenever we find a partner, customer counterparty, no matter where we start — whether it’s networking or computing — we always look to land and expand.

As Steve Jobs used to say, learn on a Mac, stay on a Mac. We want people to learn on IonQ, build business on IonQ, solve the world’s most challenging problems with IonQ and really make a tremendous positive world impact using our systems. 

With quantum being a really fast-moving space, is there anything in particular you're looking forward to or hoping will happen in this realm?

Our acquisition of Oxford Ionics is the largest acquisition or merger in the quantum space ever. 

It’s a really important transaction, not just for IonQ, but for the US and UK Transatlantic Alliance. 

So both Oxford Ionics and IonQ are the leading ion trap quantum computing companies in the world. We’ve known each other from afar for a long time. We each do work for national security agencies on both sides of the Atlantic and together we’re stronger. 

Our message at London Tech Week is a huge endorsement of the Oxford talent pool and of the Oxford Cambridge triangle. It’s a big investment in the rest of the UK. 

We view this as a merger. IonQ has a US$10bn market cap, so a billion-dollar deal really is a game changer for us. 

We’re not yet Nvidia- or Qualcomm-sized, but we hope that together, IonQ and Oxford Ionics will be a business of that size in coming years.

How important are events like London Tech Week in creating a forum for subjects like quantum and AI?  

We also have the room where it happens, but at the end of the day, quantum used to be a little bit of a curiosity. Today, it’s become a mainstream event and every FTSE 100, Fortune 500 CEO has a quantum strategy. 

If we made huge products in the last five years, the next three to five years I think, will make even more progress. 

One of the things that’s poorly understood about quantum computing is that we’re not like classical computing, where you double every Moore's law every 18 months. 

With Quantum, we’re doubling every cubit that we add. The difference between systems for us is not a factor of two, it could be a factor of 200 million. 

This inflexion point will just become doubly exponentially more powerful.

I’m a big believer in the talent pool here. We’re going to grow our office and investment here and, because of this fantastic merger, we really think that Oxford Ionics and IonQ are now the clear leaders in the quantum computing and networking space on a global basis. 

Great things are going to happen here. Watch this space.