Everyone’s Talking About IonQ. Smart Money Is Watching Nvidia Instead.

Trey ThoelckeThu, September 24, 2026 at 12:05 PM UTC

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24/7 Wall St.Quick Read -

IonQ's real-time quantum error decoder is a genuine technical milestone, but shares remain 45% lower over the past year with a −487% operating margin.

Stephanie Link recommends owning a basket of quantum names for direct exposure while treating Nvidia as the ecosystem's primary capital beneficiary.

Nvidia posted $96 billion in quarterly revenue with 66% operating margins and returned $26 billion to shareholders in a single quarter.

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IonQ (NYSE:IONQ) stock is ripping after the company announced what it calls the industry's first end-to-end real-time quantum error decoder. This genuine technical milestone attacks the central obstacle in quantum computing: you cannot pause the machine to clean up errors without destroying the very speed advantage that justifies building it. But here's what you should actually be watching.

However, the chart and the headline are telling different stories. IonQ shares trade at $41.26, down 3.0% in Thursday's premarket, even after a 12.0% one-week surge that captured the breakthrough pop. Zoom out and the picture is uglier: down 8.0% year to date and 45.1% lower over the past year. A great week does not undo 12 underwater months.

The Breakthrough Is Company-Specific

On Wednesday's episode of CNBC's Fast Money, panelist Steve Grasso laid out the case: "This they've solved. But if you looked at the chart on the rest of these, ... they're solving it, not the rest of the quantum space. And you also have to look at what's the spend. They burn a ton of cash. The whole industry." The market echoed that intraday: while IonQ jumped, rivals Rigetti Computing (NASDAQ:RGTI) and D-Wave Quantum (NYSE:QBTS) both fell. This is one panel on one show on one day, but the market drew the same distinction.

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The underlying financials support the caution. For its most recent quarter, IonQ posted revenue of $80.05 million against a GAAP net loss of $1.87 billion and an operating margin of −487.4%. Full-year adjusted EBITDA was guided to a loss of $310 million to $330 million. That is a research project priced like a product company.

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IONQ Earnings Explorer — 24/7 Wall St.Redirect: Own the Ecosystem

Portfolio Manager Stephanie Link offered the answer on that same Fast Money episode. She framed quantum as coexisting with AI rather than cannibalizing it: "The timeline is you want to own a basket of these names" for direct exposure, but the ecosystem beneficiary is where the real capital sits.

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) traded at $222.85, down 1.18% in Thursday's premarket, up 7.01% over the past month, and up 25.19% over the past year. Three reasons retirement-focused capital belongs here:

Cash flow at scale, right now. Nvidia delivered revenue of $96.22 billion (+105.8% year over year) last quarter, with an operating margin of 66.2% and free cash flow of $21.34 billion. Its Data Center segment alone generated $89.0 billion, dwarfing IonQ's entire trailing revenue base.

Locked-in demand. Vera Rubin is in full production with multiyear commitments from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and the hyperscalers, plus over $500 billion in third-party AI infrastructure capital partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR.

Capital returned to owners. Nvidia returned roughly $26 billion to shareholders in Q2 alone via buybacks and dividends, with $99 billion remaining on its repurchase authorization. That is a profile likely to attract retirement money.

NVDA Earnings Explorer — 24/7 Wall St.Counterweight Nobody Else Will Give You

The case cannot be oversold. Nvidia is a $5.45 trillion AI infrastructure company, and quantum is a rounding error in its business today. Buying Nvidia for quantum exposure means buying an AI compute platform that also happens to sit in the quantum supply chain. Investors who want the direct quantum position should follow the panelist's suggestion and own a basket, not a single pure-play. But the premise on which the ecosystem argument rests held up the moment the breakthrough landed.

A Verdict Retirement Investors Can Act On

Investors should lean toward the picks-and-shovels compute platform with real profit, real free cash flow, and real capital return. Here is the falsifiable trigger to watch: if IonQ actually commissions its 256-qubit systems in 2027 on schedule and starts converting $485 million in remaining performance obligations into self-funding cash revenue, revisit the pure-play. Until then, the ecosystem builder is the position.

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Source: “AOL Money”