IONQ Inc
NYSE:IONQ
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IONQ Inc
Earnings Call Analysis
Q3-2023 Analysis
IONQ Inc
IonQ has cemented its position as a key player in the quantum computing field, boasting a remarkable year with its potent mix of top quantum talent, robust patent portfolio, and record financial performance. As of October 31st, 2023, the company has obtained a significant volume of patents with 74 U.S. issued, 163 U.S. pending, 19 international issued, and 111 international pending patent applications. With a specialized team in place, IonQ's technical and commercial strategy is unfolding with their innovative roadmap and AQ targets currently meeting and anticipating customer demands. IonQ's financial results reflect the fruits of this labor, outpacing outlook predictions with $6.1 million in third-quarter revenue and exiting with $26.3 million in bookings, putting the total at $58.4 million year-to-date. Recognizing the momentum, IonQ has boosted the full-year 2023 bookings projection to $60 million to $63 million.
IonQ's strategic investments into R&D are evident, with a total operating cost increase of 75% year over year. This considered hike to $48.3 million for Q3 underscores an aggressive commitment to innovate beyond current quantum technologies, with a particular emphasis on software solutions. The company realizes that while there is hardware in quantum computing, the majority of innovation and control rests within software. This determined focus on elevating software—be it through developing a new operating system for next-generation hardware, a compiler optimizing circuits for specific applications, or identifying applications with potential commercial advantages—speaks to IonQ's understanding of their pivotal role in transitioning quantum computing from theory to practical use.
Financial prudence is a core strength at IonQ, signaled by its strong cash reserves of $485.1 million. Although currently well-capitalized, IonQ filed a universal shelf registration statement with the SEC, offering strategic malleability for potential M&A or further growth initiatives. This strategic foresight is paired with an uptick in revenue outlook for the full year to $21.2 million to $22 million. IonQ's adept management of financial resources, combined with an optimistic revenue forecast that includes accelerated delivery against customer contracts for the fourth quarter, and revenue guidance for the same period of $5.3 million to $6.1 million, reaffirms their trajectory towards a sustainable and profitable future.
IonQ's commercial endeavors have gathered impressive momentum with bookings reaching $100 million since 2021. The company's current pipeline not only boasts quantity but discernible quality, indicating that their commercial efforts are evolving in parallel with their technical advancements. IonQ's pipeline diversity, which now includes high-profile collaborations, showcases their expanding reach as they dabble in quantum networking—a field poised for exponential growth if realized to its full potential. Active conversations to provide more systems to interested parties hint at further expansion and strategic deals in the foreseeable future, solidifying IonQ's role as a trailblazer in the maturation of quantum computing.
IonQ's production strategy is as dynamic as the technology itself, adapting to both domestic and international demand with agility. Their ability to produce systems on-site at customer facilities, like those planned for Switzerland, is testament to their foresight and dedication to customer satisfaction. This approach not only demonstrates IonQ's flexibility in production but also highlights their strategic intent to use these installations as a springboard for further regional expansion, particularly in Europe. By retaining partial system capacity, IonQ ensures a continued presence and resource in these crucial new markets. Their readiness to scale production to meet any level of demand exudes confidence in their product and their position within the industry.
IonQ's ongoing deals, such as those with AFRL and QuantumBasel, signify a diversified approach to quantum technology. QuantumBasel presents a milestone system deal, marking IonQ's entry into Europe with a promising five-year contract. The contrast with the AFRL deal is stark—focused on quantum networking research with smaller nodes designed for experimentation rather than computation. Here, IonQ reveals an understanding of varying customer needs—balancing high-performance systems aimed at prolonged uptime and high AQ scores against systems designed for flexibility and customization in quantum networking R&D. As IonQ proactively engages multiple potential partners in quantum networking, the company stands on the brink of pioneering new territories in quantum research and applications, a bold move that could significantly propel the quantum internet vision and, consequently, their business.
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Good day, and welcome to the IonQ Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jordan Shapiro. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to IonQ's Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. My name is Jordan Shapiro, and I'm the Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis and Head of Investor Relations here at IonQ. I am pleased to be joined on today's call by Peter Chapman, IonQ's President and Chief Executive Officer; Thomas Kramer, our Chief Financial Officer; and Dean Kassmann, our Vice President of Engineering. By now, everyone should have access to the company's third quarter 2023 earnings press release issued this afternoon, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.inq.com.Please note that on today's call, management will refer to adjusted EBITDA, which is a non-GAAP financial measure. While the company believes this non-GAAP financial measure provides useful information for investors, the presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. You are directed to our press release for a reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to its closest comparable GAAP measure.During the call, we will discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. These comments are based on our predictions and expectations as of today. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our 10-Q that we intend to file with the SEC tomorrow. We undertake no obligation to revise any statements to reflect changes that occur after this call, except as required by law.Now, I will turn it over to Peter Chapman, President and CEO of IonQ. Peter?
Thanks, Jordan, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Today, we are calling in from our new Seattle office, which is our location for manufacturing quantum computing systems at scale.We are very happy with the financial and technical progress that we have made this quarter and so far this year. We are seeing a clear pickup in interest from early adopters of quantum computing with revenue of $6.1 million in Q3 2023, representing a 122% increase from the prior year period. Moreover, we added $26.3 million in bookings during the third quarter. This puts us above the high end of our previously announced annual bookings range for the year with a full quarter left to go.Over the course of this year, we have substantially built the size and visibility of our sales pipeline. Though we expect it to continue to be lumpy, today, we are pleased to announce that by the end of 2023, we are on a path to exceeding our goal of a cumulative $100 million in bookings since the start of 2021. In 2022, we told you that there was a possibility IonQ could sell a full quantum system by the end of 2023. We have now sold 4.IonQ's commercial and technical momentum continues to accelerate ahead of our original expectations. We believe our path to commercial advantage with #AQ 64 is clear without requiring full error correction. Customers are expressing strong interest in our #AQ 64 Tempo systems with our #AQ 35 Forte enterprise systems as stepping stones to develop quantum algorithms in the ecosystem. Moreover, we're seeing growing interest in quantum networking, bolstered by our recent sales in the United States Air Force Research Lab.The main conclusions you should draw from today's call are that: one, our pipeline is bigger and better than ever; and two, that our technical momentum, while always arduous, continues to be ahead of schedule.Now let's dive into the details. IonQ is focused on ushering in the enterprise era of quantum, and our financial performance is beginning to reflect that reality. Both public and private institutions are quickly coming to the conclusion that early adopters stand to benefit the most from quantum technology and are eager to prepare themselves for the quantum era. For those of you who turned into our presentation at Quantum World Congress in September, now that we made 2 major announcements that demonstrate IonQ's continued market leadership. The first announcement is that we have agreed to sell 2 systems to the United States Air Force Research Lab, or AFRL, in a significant deal for IonQ and the quantum computing industry as a whole. This $25.5 million deal includes 2 quantum network node systems, which will be used for research and application development. Notably, these systems will use our cutting edge barium qubit technology.The second major announcement from Quantum World Congress was the reveal of 2 new IonQ system generation. IonQ Forte Enterprise will be a rack-mounted production-grade #AQ 35 system. Forte Enterprise will deliver on our goal of reducing system footprint while providing modularity, all in a rack-mounted form factor that will integrate seamlessly into existing data centers. It will also be the first IonQ system generation manufactured at our new Seattle facility.Following Forte Enterprise, IonQ Tempo will be our rack-mounted production-grade #AQ 64 system. We expect this upcoming generation to allow our customers to begin solving certain problems with quantum computing that even today's best classical supercomputers cannot, or what we refer to as commercial advantage. We have already announced plans to deliver one of each of these systems, Forte Enterprise and Tempo, to service QuantumBasel in Switzerland. We also recently announced that IonQ has officially reached #AQ 29 on a barium-based system. This is powerful validation of our work on barium systems with their performance now catching up to that of our ytterbium-based IonQ Forte. We believe the future of trapped ion quantum computers will be enhanced by barium. And this milestone shows we are one step closer to #AQ 64.And another technical road map announcement. I would also like to highlight an important development that we had discussed at our Analyst Day in September. IonQ now believes that we will be able to reach #AQ 64 and commercial advantage using error mitigation rather than needing to implement full error correction. Error mitigation requires fewer qubits than error correction and makes us even more confident in our ability to reach #AQ 64 in the near term.Alongside our exciting progress on hardware, IonQ's commercial momentum is continuing to pick up speed. In September, we also hosted the official opening of the QLab alongside our partners at the University of Maryland. Speakers at the event included U.S. Senator Ben Cardin; Maryland Senate President, Bill Ferguson; and Maryland Lieutenant Governor, Aruna Miller. QLab is just one example on how IonQ customers are creating ecosystems around quantum computing. In November, we were awarded an extension of our contract with Zapata AI and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to lay the groundwork for benchmarking quantum computers.On the corporate front, we announced last month that Chris Monroe, IonQ's Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, has returned his focus to quantum academic research and policy pursuits. We will continue to benefit from his future work via the intellectual property agreement that IonQ maintains with Duke University. That agreement grants us exclusive access to trapped ion quantum computing patents generated by our co-founder's department. We are grateful for Chris's many contributions to IonQ and early foundational scientific breakthroughs.As we enter IonQ's next stage of growth with many scientific breakthroughs behind us, we are now entirely focused on executing against our road map, which requires more engineering and product development than science. In some respects, this represents a generational shift, but one that is natural for rapidly evolving companies. Our team is experienced in growing companies. We are building on that strength while continuing to add new capabilities for today, tomorrow and the quantum future ahead.In our Analyst Day presentation last month, we introduced you to the broader lineup of our IonQ executive team. This team includes Dr. Dean Kassmann, Dr. Dave Mehuys and Dr. Pat Tang, our VPs of engineering, product engineering and R&D, respectively. These industry veterans from Amazon, Blue Origin and Apple represent the next generation of IonQ technical leadership. With their vision and experience on our side, we are fully confident in our ability to deliver on our road map. We believe IonQ's Forte Enterprise and Tempo in their respective #AQ 35 and #AQ 64 milestones are right around the corner. Organizations are starting to recognize this potential and are seeking out contracts with IonQ, as reflected by our strong bookings thus far in 2023.Our momentum continues to grow. Just today, we were honored to have been selected as a winner of Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 award that recognizes the most innovative, fastest-growing companies in North America. In 2022, we told you there was a possibility IonQ could sell a full quantum system by the end of 2023. We have now sold 4. Today, I can tell you our pipeline of customers seriously interested in purchasing IonQ systems is robust and gaining momentum each quarter. So in addition to this being yet another milestone quarter for IonQ, we are even more excited about the bright future ahead for our business.With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Thomas for a more detailed review of the financials. Thomas?
Thank you, Peter. Before we dive into our financial results, we are pleased to announce the newest additions to our executive team: Margaret Arakawa as Chief Marketing Officer; and Kurt Kennett as Vice President of Software. Margaret brings to IonQ over 25 years of hardware, software and cloud experience. At Microsoft, she was responsible for the multibillion dollar U.S. Windows and Surface businesses. More recently, she served as the Chief Marketing Officer at both Outreach and Fastly, where she led all aspects of marketing. Kurts comes with over 30 years of software, firmware and integration experience at Microsoft, Nintendo and Nortel Networks.We are excited to welcome Margaret and Kurt, two technology industry veterans to the IonQ team. Margaret and Kurt will contribute their deep expertise to IonQ's already robust bench of talent, which includes 65 PhD graduates, 84 master's graduates and counting. Of these quantum pioneers, several earned their degrees in Chris Monroe's lab, Jungsang Kim's lab and/or both. This ensures that IonQ's scientific heritage is deeply ingrained in our DNA as we charge towards our next stage of growth. Today, IonQ is proudly composed of some of the world's top quantum talent and industry leaders.Our patent portfolio includes 74 U.S. issued patents, plus another 163 U.S. pending patent applications as well as 19 international issued patents and another 111 international pending patent applications. Note that these patent portfolio figures are as of October 31, 2023. As Peter mentioned earlier, our team is in a strong position to execute on our road map, deliver on our AQ targets and fulfill our customer needs. We have full confidence in our team, and I want to personally thank everyone at IonQ for your hard work and dedication that has led to a record year for the company so far.Now let's walk through this quarter's financial results in more detail. As Peter mentioned, we had an excellent quarter recognizing $6.1 million in revenue, which is above the high end of the outlook we previously provided. We have successfully delivered on percentage of completion projects earlier than expected, which resulted in the acceleration of some revenue into the third quarter.We exited the quarter with $26.3 million in bookings. This put us at $58.4 million so far this year, above the high end of our previous guidance range of between $49 million and $56 million for the full year with the fourth quarter still to go. Today, we are increasing the full year 2023 bookings projection range to be between $60 million and $63 million. Given that we are still early on in IonQ's commercialization phase, I want to reiterate my comment from prior earnings calls that we expect bookings to continue to be lumpy for quite some time.Moving down the income statement. For Q3 2023, our total operating costs and expenses for the third quarter were $48.3 million, up 75% from $27.7 million in the prior year period, but still within our plan for the year. To break this down further, our research and development costs for the third quarter were $24.6 million, up 85% from $13.3 million in the prior year period. Recall that we are investing heavily in R&D, and given projected demand, are also investing in our manufacturing capabilities to build more systems than previously anticipated this year.Our sales and marketing costs in the third quarter were $5.0 million, up 156% from $2.0 million in the prior year period. This increase was due to us growing our go-to-market function and additional sales and support personnel as we continue our investment into our commercial efforts.Our general and administrative costs in the third quarter were $13.9 million, up 37% from the $10.1 million in the prior year period.All of this resulted in a net loss of $44.8 million in the third quarter compared to $24.0 million in the prior year period. It's important to note that these results include a non-cash loss of $7.6 million for the third quarter related to the fair value of our warrant liabilities, which impacts our GAAP bottom line results. We saw an adjusted EBITDA loss for the third quarter of $22.4 million compared to a $13.4 million loss in the prior year period. Note that we projected an adjusted EBITDA loss for the year of $80.5 million. So with this quarter's loss, we continue to expect to remain within our plan for the year.Turning now to our balance sheet. Cash, cash equivalents and investments as of September 30, 2023, were $485.1 million.Tomorrow, you may notice us filing a universal shelf registration statement with the SEC. While we continue to believe that our cash on hand is more than sufficient to get the company to cash flow positive, and we have no immediate plans to raise additional capital, we also believe that opportunities for strategic M&A may arise in the near to medium term. We are comfortable with our cash balance, but want to maintain the optionality to raise additional capital to fund M&A and strategic growth. As a reminder, this announcement is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities, nor may there be any sale of securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such an offer or solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the effectiveness of the registration statement with the SEC and registration or qualification under the securities law of any state or jurisdiction. Any offer, solicitation or sale of any of the securities registered under the registration statement will be made only through the prospectus and the prospectus supplement once the SEC declares the registration statement to be effective.Now, turning to our fourth quarter and full year 2023 outlook. We are pleased to increase our full year 2023 revenue outlook to $21.2 million to $22.0 million for the full year 2023. This represents our expectation that we may be able to accelerate delivery against milestones on some of our customer contracts in the fourth quarter. Additionally, we are introducing fourth quarter revenue guidance of between $5.3 million and $6.1 million.Lastly, I would also like to highlight that the announced AFRL deal Peter mentioned is expected to recognize revenue over the following 18 months as the project works its way towards delivery. And as I already mentioned, we are also increasing our bookings guidance to between $60 million and $63 million for the full year 2023, increasing our target to reflect our successful system sales to AFRL in the third quarter.With that, I'll turn the call back over to Peter.
Clearly, the IonQ team has been hard at work and executing diligently against our technical and financial road map. This is shaping up to be yet another landmark year for IonQ and quantum computing as a whole, and I could not be more proud of our team that is making it all happen. What you should conclude from today's call is that, one, our commercial traction has reached $100 million in bookings since the start of 2021. Two, our pipeline is bigger and better than ever. And three, our technical momentum continues to be ahead of schedule.And with that, I'd like to turn the call back over to our operator for the Q&A session. Operator?
[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from David Williams with Benchmark.
Congrats on the really solid progress here, gentlemen.
Thank you.
I guess first, Thomas, you had talked about potential M&A activity in terms of your filing there. Could you maybe talk a little bit about what you think would be compelling or attractive in this market? Where are you looking to fill holes? And what are the technologies out there that could be complementary to your existing business?
Excellent question, and thank you for bringing that up. First, I want to emphasize that this is a shelf filing, and it's just something that we want to have in place for if and when it becomes appropriate. Secondly, we are constantly scanning the market, and anything that will allow us to advance our technical road map or advance the delivery to our customers of our services and systems is something that we will find interesting. And that's a pretty wide gamut, but it's also important to us that we get a deal that will be good. We're not just out there to acquire things. But we're looking at everything. So if you have suggestions, send them our way.
Certainly will do that. And maybe, Peter, just kind of thinking about the day-to-day impact of Chris leaving. What are the operational aspects that may be affected? And any color you can provide that may give us comfort in the transition and continuity of the road map, I think that would be very helpful.
Obviously, Chris is one of the 2 co-founders and seminal in the quantum computing business, starting way back in the mid-90s. However, Chris would be the first one to tell you that the physics behind what it is that IonQ is doing has now been solved. It's largely an engineering problem. And so -- and we have been saying this for the last couple of years that the company is moving from its academic origins now to an engineering and even more so now to a product-driven company. So while Chris is leaving, he's going back to his academic roots. He's teaching classes at Duke and will continue to work on quantum computing. And we will partner with him and Duke University as we have always. As a day-to-day operational impact, it will not have an impact kind of going forward. Chris is an advisor -- has been an advisor to the company, but has no direct reports that report to him and hasn't since day 1. So it's largely -- it will have no impact to the company.
Okay. Fantastic. And then just one more, if I can quickly. Can you talk a little bit about the software strategy and how you see that developing? I know at the Analyst Day, you discussed the revenue really predominantly coming from hardware sales for now and maybe software later. But can you give us a sense of how you see this playing out into the model? And it feels like maybe a SaaS model developing potentially over time. Is that a fair way to think about it?
Well, we have software investments kind of all up and down the stack. So for instance, where you have a team which is working on a next-generation operating system for our quantum computers. And so -- which is to be able to do -- support the next-generation hardware and quantum networking and such. We have another team which is working on a next-generation compiler. And so this is one of the things that is also leading us to #AQ 64 is to be able to optimize the circuits and to be able to make sure the compiler generates gates which are -- get the best performance out of your particular application.If I go higher in the stack, then you see we have an applications team today. And so they're working on applications with customers. What we're now focusing on, which is now a little bit new, in the past, we've kind of worked with customers on POCs and kind of early quantum. But we're now focused on finding the 1 or 2 applications that we can get to commercial advantage where we can start to put these applications in productions so that they're ready to go when we have a Tempo system. So that's kind of our latest kind of change in focus on that front.But we have a fairly large software group inside the company. It's been said before that a large part of what IonQ is doing -- obviously, there's a hardware component, but most of the things that we do is controlled by software. So it's very much a software investment in terms of being able to get performance out of our systems. Operator, if we go to the next caller?
Of course. The next question comes from Quinn Bolton with Needham & Co.
Peter and Thomas, I'll offer my congratulations as well on the continued momentum. Peter, just wanted to maybe challenge you a little bit on what you said on IonQ sort of transitioning more to an engineering and even a product company. I think you guys have established a pretty good track record on the technical milestones to date for the #AQ road map. But I guess what I'm wondering is it still feels like there's a fair amount of work to be done on quantum networking and quantum error correction. And wondering if you could provide your thoughts on some of those challenges. Maybe they're not physics, but still feels like there's some work to be done there, and was wondering if you might be able to comment on those two areas.
Certainly. And we have Dean here, and I can pass it to. There is not a shortage of something to do. And in parts, there's not a shortage of kind of areas to go after for the company. So when we talk about -- my comments were mostly focused around kind of quantum computation and getting to #AQ 64. But you're 100% right. There's a wide open field in quantum networking, as an example. And so that will require more science than maybe the computation side. But I'll give it to Dean to comment.
Thank you, Peter. So you are correct. We have a big engineering lift in front of us. If you think about photonic interconnected systems, right? Chris's lab was one of the first to develop and kind of demonstrate the interconnects working using different colors of light. And so we're currently working through those pieces. We have that research actually occurring here in the Seattle labs. And so as we move forward, the engineering focus is going to be on not the physics aspects of that as much as will be towards developing micro-optics, being able to do all of the other pieces of the software stack to be able to support all of those. Those are going to be engineering, optical design, mechanical engineering problems that we have in front of us. And so that's really where our focus will be over the coming year.
I appreciate that. Second maybe for Peter and Thomas. Wanted to see if you might be able to sort of compare and contrast the AFRL deal with the QuantumBasel deal. The revenue seems to be similar. I think but not sure if you'll comment whether these are 100% system sales to AFRL. It sounds like they may be. And then you mentioned recognizing revenue over the next 18 months as you move towards system delivery. I thought with QuantumBasel, it was more you would rev rec once those systems were put in place, which would imply perhaps a little bit later rev rec policy for QuantumBasel, maybe a little bit earlier for the AFRL lab. And so maybe just walk us through the rev rec accounting on the AFRL transaction?
And I think this is -- we'll tag team this one. So the deals are different in that one of them is for quantum networking and the other one is for quantum computation and application work. And they also have two different delivery windows. And I'll let Thomas just talk about how that impacts rev rec.
Yes, absolutely. So if you think about what we said about the QuantumBasel deal, these are two systems that will be delivered on-prem in Switzerland. And the customer will be running their jobs there for a period of roughly 5 years. We will start recognizing revenue on the system part of that itself once the first system is up and running until the end of the contract. We will swap out the machine in between. But that is essentially a system deal. We are retaining part of the capacity of those systems so that we will use it pretty much as a beachhead into Europe. And that is a super exciting deal. And it shows our first series entry into Europe. And also, it shows people actually buying up 2 future generations of our systems in one go. So, super exciting.We're also very excited about the AFRL deal, but it's a very different deal. It is for us to deliver much smaller systems, which will be network nodes that AFRL can conduct research on -- sorry, quantum networking on. Now, once we deliver those nodes to AFRL up in Rome, New York, the entire revenue recognition will be finished. That will take us 18 months to do. And the reason why the revenue recognition is different here is that it's a different part of the GAAP rules for recognizing revenue and is based on percentage of complete as opposed to usage. And so as we complete more of the systems, we recognize more of that revenue. And we will finish recognizing all of it when they are up and running in AFRL's Rome facility, which we anticipate will take 18 months since contract signing.
Got it. Thank you for explaining the differences. Really appreciate it.
[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Trevor Janoskie with Goldman Sachs.
This is Trevor on for Toshiya. Thanks for letting me hop on here. So real quick on your bookings. There was, of the $25.5 million from Air Force Research Lab, $28 million from Basel for a total of $53.5 million. Could you provide us with some information on the remaining $5 million in bookings? And when would you expect this ex-systems portion of bookings to accelerate?
Sorry. Sorry, could you repeat the question? I apologize.
Yes. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay. So on your bookings, where you had $25.5 million with the Air Force Research Lab, $28 million from QuantumBasel for a total of $53.5 million, but your total was $58.5 million. Can you provide us with some more information on that remaining $5 million in bookings? And when would you expect that ex-systems portion of bookings to really accelerate?
So yes, the -- I mean the difference is just that we have other contracts and other sales. We also have a small portion that we can upsell to the AFRL, and hence, I was just a little bit confused. But that hasn't happened yet, and we will come back to you and tell you when that is. And it's -- I mean, it's not a monumental number, but it will be great. We can point you to the other deal announcements we made in prior Questions, and that should enable you to just like add them all up together.
Okay. Makes sense. And a more longer-term question. But in your high-volume manufacturing road map, would you be able to quantify how many systems you believe you would be able to build within a year, let's say, 2025 or 2026?
So we have -- that is a great question. It's also a great problem to have. The reality is that we will be able to expand our facilities so that we can scale to any amount of demand. And we would love to have to worry about where can we find enough facility, but we can do that. Right now, we are planning to build a number of machines at our own facilities, but we are also planning to build some machines actually on-prem at the customers' facilities. The Switzerland machines, for instance, will be built in Switzerland.
Understood. And just one more for -- sorry, go ahead, Peter.
Just to add one thing, though. You should get your orders in early if you would like to get the first off the line, so to speak. So we encourage customers to order early.
Understood. And one more on the quantum networking deal. It seems like -- well, and you said it that these systems are different from your actual quantum computers. I guess, could you provide some more color on that difference -- on what the difference is? Maybe the -- how long it takes to manufacture these? Is there an #AQ score that you provide for these? I guess anything would be helpful.
Yes. They're kind of -- there's two different purposes. One of them, which is the Forte Enterprise and Tempo systems, those ones are -- people are worried about uptime, and they're looking for as high an #AQ number as they can possibly get. And so they're building applications with those.The networking is more on the R&D side. And so what they're looking to do is to get quantum computers and then add in their own hardware to be able to do quantum networking. And so sometimes they're asking for us to make modifications so it's compatible with their hardware. It is -- they don't care about so much about the number of qubits or the #AQ. That's not really their focus. And so -- and they're more workbench systems. They care more about can we share technical information so that they can figure out how to integrate their hardware in. So it's kind of two different.And as far as uptime is concerned, I mean, that's not really the goal of the networking systems in the short term. It's not really about total uptime. It's more like, can we get the basics to work? Or can we get it to work over maybe starting in a mile and then over 10 miles and 100 miles and hopefully, eventually, thousands of miles. So it's much more of an R&D phase than what you see in the other systems, which are really production systems. Obviously, sometime in the future, we hope that quantum networking is a thing, and it will drive tremendous demand for production systems. Because if you're going to build a quantum internet, you're going to need a lot of these things. But that's obviously -- we're not selling that yet today. It's mostly in R&D. I don't know if Dean, you would have --
So to give you a little bit of color in terms of just the differences between the hardware and the machines. The software stacks can change based off of the customer needs, for example. And so some of the research customer software stack, we need to tailor to AFRL's needs. On the hardware side, the hardware is a lower qubit system to be able to support the networking. Similar atomic species. They're both barium systems just like our Tempo systems and the systems for AFRL. The optical system design has a lot of leverage from our existing systems. A lot of the mechanical design has carryover. There is some of it, readout and everything is different based off of the needs of our networking. And so while there are many common components, there are some distinct pieces, networking being one piece of it. But just part of it is just the needs of the research community versus the needs of a commercial installation.
Understood. And it seems like these quantum networking systems have a high price tag and a quicker rev rec. Could we expect more announcements like this over the next 18 months maybe?
We certainly hope so. We won't talk about quantity, but yes, we -- there's a number of companies and startups which are working on quantum networking. So as part of our pipeline that we talked about in terms of we have a robust pipeline, we're in the middle of conversations to provide more of these things with other customers.
Thank you all very much. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Peter Chapman for any closing remarks. Please, you may proceed.
I want to thank everyone for joining us today and for all the thoughtful questions. Finally, I want to thank the entire IonQ team for the continued diligent work that allowed us to achieve many business and technical milestones this quarter. We truly believe that we are changing the world one day at a time, and I look forward to speaking with all of you soon. Thank you.
This conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines. Have a great day.