IonQ, Inc. (IONQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

May 16, 2022

New York Stock Exchange US Information Technology Technology Hardware, Storage and Peripherals earnings 44 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator

operator
#1

Greetings, and welcome to the IonQ First Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the call over to your host, Jordan Shapiro. Please go ahead.

Jordan Shapiro

executive
#2

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to IonQ's First Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. My name is Jordan Shapiro, and I am 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; and Thomas Kramer, our Chief Financial Officer. By now, everyone should have access to the company's first quarter 2022 earnings press release issued this afternoon, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website. 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. This call discusses certain non-GAAP measures, and you are directed to our press release for a reconciliation of such measures to GAAP. Before we begin, please note that some of our remarks on this call will be forward-looking. Therefore, please refer to the cautionary statement in today's press release for additional details about these remarks. Please note that forward-looking statements made during this conference call speak only as of today. Now I will turn it over to Peter Chapman, President and CEO of IonQ. Peter?

Peter Chapman

executive
#3

Thanks, Jordan, and thank you all for joining us today. Roughly a year before we went public, we defined a multiyear plan to drive revenue growth and technical progress over 6 years. Today, we stand at the 18-month mark or about 1/4 of the way into that plan. I thought I would use this earnings call to give a quick report card on progress to date and provide my thoughts on the road map ahead. Originally, we expected to achieve $114 million TCV contract bookings, cumulatively in the first 4 years of the plan. On the last earnings call, we discussed that we are seeing an increased interest in customers purchasing dedicated IonQ quantum computers. As a result, we announced our expectation that TCV contract bookings could be 9 figures for the 3-year period from 2021 to 2023, roughly a full year ahead of our original financial projections. Our original financial plan was based in part on the cumulative numbers of systems IonQ expected to bring online over that period. We projected 1 in 2022; 2 in 2023; 7 in 2024; 17 by 2025; and 33 by 2026. We currently have 2 IonQ Harmony systems that feature 11 physical qubits available via our cloud partners. We recently announced our latest generation system called IonQ Aria, which features up to 32 physical qubits and 20 algorithmic qubits. In addition, a second Aria system is currently under construction to meet potential rising customer demand. Today, we are excited to announce the next generation in our series of ytterbium systems called IonQ Forte. Our early internal results indicate that this machine has an even higher average 2-qubit gate fidelity than Aria. In coming days, we will be issuing a press release on preliminary fidelity of the system and a blog post that will provide additional insight into how Forte operates. We anticipate that Forte will launch for beta access in the second half of this year. We also have our first system based on barium qubits. Controlled by longer wavelength visible light, barium systems are expected to make the optical design much easier while confirming higher performance. To reach our 2023 goals and beyond, this year, we're working to establish and optimize our manufacturing process to build systems at scale. We are focused on features such as system footprint, manufacturability, deployability, industrial design and reliability as part of this development process. With regard to the number of systems we expected this year, we are clearly ahead of plan. On the applications front, I am happy to report that early results with customers demonstrate that we're making serious inroads with quantum machine learning. Recently, we were able to show that we can effectively train quantum image classification models to achieve performance that rivals correspondingly classical machine learning models, while using only a small fraction of the number of training parameters. These learnings built upon the results we previously reported on the speed of the training of the machine learning models and the results themselves were more expressive and better capture the signal of the original data. We are learning how this can lead to superior performance as we scale up to higher numbers of algorithmic qubits. In summary, IonQ is firing on all cylinders, making progress on or ahead of schedule when compared to our road map. But that's just what we've accomplished to date. What's more important is where we are in our race to make quantum computers that broadly beat classical systems. The first thing we need to do is to push our systems to their limits on native gate fidelity, i.e., the fidelity that qubits can achieve without error correction. IonQ Forte is another step in that direction. But as you'll see with upcoming results from our barium system, adding this new qubit species to our arsenal pushes us even further along that path. Initial testing suggest the fundamental error limit for 2 qubit gates using barium qubits will be significantly lower than ytterbium qubits with a fidelity limit of roughly 99.98%. We've already demonstrated and released data showing that our first barium system has extremely low State Preparation And Measurement or SPAM errors, another important type of qubit error. To go beyond the fundamental limits of native gate fidelity, one must implement error correction, which requires a higher number of physical qubits. Last year, together with our university partners, IonQ became the first quantum computing company to actually implement an error-corrected qubit, and we did it with a 13:1 cubic overhead. And an important next milestone for the industry will be to run gates between multiple error-corrected qubits that result in lower 2 qubit error rates. Even with the low overhead, we need more physical qubits to implement error correction. We've already proven our multi-core chips can fit more qubits into a single system. Our investment in manufacturing engineering this year will enable us to continue scaling up our systems so that we can achieve error correction in the future. At the same time, we're also working to connect multiple systems together to combine their power using a technology called photonic interconnects. Our partner labs at the University of Maryland and Duke University pioneered this idea many years ago with demonstrations appearing in peer-reviewed journals such as Science In Nature. And this technology has been reproduced by many other labs throughout the world. IonQ is working hard to translate these ideas from the laboratory into a commercial setting. The era of broadly applicable quantum computers is coming into crisper focus every day. To summarize, I'm pleased with the progress IonQ is making both commercially and technologically. We entered the public market as the first pure-play quantum computing hardware company with the belief that we can develop world-changing technology. We have demonstrated the value of our systems numerous times with customers, who are working to understand how to apply quantum computing to their everyday business problems in industries ranging from energy and mobility to machine learning and financial services. Financially, we are very well capitalized with cash, cash equivalents and investments of approximately $586 million, which, on our current plan, we believe to be sufficient to get the company to profitability without the need to raise any additional capital. Last quarter, we were honored in the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list for 2022, alongside some of the most innovative companies of our era, and we intend to continue pushing the limits on quantum technology. None of this will be possible without the relentless efforts of the entire IonQ team, our respect for fundamental science and our long-standing dedication to developing and commercializing cutting-edge technology. While there is still much work to be done, we are proud of our accomplishments so far. I encourage you to read through our 2022 Letter to Shareholders that outlines our vision for the future of IonQ and the quantum computing industry. We believe that the future is bright and are happy to have you alongside us for the journey. Next, Thomas will provide an update on the financials.

Thomas Kramer

executive
#4

Thank you, Peter. It has been quite the quarter. Before diving into our financials, I would first like to take a few minutes to address some common questions we have received over the last quarter about the increasing likelihood that IonQ will sell entire quantum computers in addition to selling access over the cloud. Let's start with why a prospect will be asking to buy into our systems. There are 2 main reasons why customer might prefer to own a system. The first and most common is the desire to control when they compute. As of now, our cloud offering operates with a queue system and there are certain times where a customer may be in line behind a large number of jobs waiting to be processed, say, on a Monday morning at 9:30 Eastern, when the U.S. stock exchange is open and financial customers are trading. If you need quantum compute time to process something time-sensitive, for instance, a hedge fund financial model or an update to road conditions, this probably would not work well for you. So having a dedicated system and being able to define the queue is likely to be important to many users. The second reason is security and the need to own certain sensitive data on in-house systems. Although we are already very diligent about keeping our customers' data secure, there are certain entities who, due to internal controls and procedures, cannot run specific processes or expose sensitive data to any machine besides their own. As we mentioned on our last quarter call, we are already seeing substantial interest in system sales stemming from private companies and governments alike. To that end, we are doubling down on making IonQ quantum computers government-ready. Our government sales efforts are already bearing fruit. In April, we announced that IonQ was part of a group of private companies and universities that received a research and development award from DARPA to fund a quantum algorithms benchmarking project. While contracting is still being finalized, we are the only quantum hardware maker selected for this multiyear award and are excited to contribute an initiative that will estimate the resources necessary to run important quantum applications. This is something IonQ has long been a public advocate of as we believe absolute transparency will benefit the quantum computing industry as a whole and give customers a standard with which to compare systems across different methods. Moving on to our financial results from the first quarter. We're happy to announce we achieved total revenue of $2 million and bookings of $4.2 million. Our investments in growing our sales team are starting to bear fruit. Moving down the statement of operations. For Q1 2022, our total operating cost and expenses for the first quarter were $20.2 million, up 171% from $7.5 million in the comparable prior year period. Break this down further. Our research and development costs for the first quarter were $7.3 million, up 101% from the $3.7 million in the year prior period. Recall that, as Peter noted, we are investing heavily in R&D and, given anticipated demand, are building more systems than previously projected this year. Our sales and marketing costs in the first quarter were $1.9 million, up 724% from $227,000 in the prior year period. This increase was due to the growth in our sales team as IonQ has started to invest heavily in our commercialization. Our general and administrative costs in the first quarter were $9.2 million, up 211% from $3 million in the comparable prior year period. This increase is largely attributable to the growth in stock-based compensation expense, which was $4.8 million for the first quarter compared to $1 million in the comparable prior year period. All of this resulted in a net loss of $4.2 million in the first quarter compared to $7.3 million in the prior year period. It is important to note that these results include a noncash gain of $13.4 million for the first quarter related to the fair value of warrant liabilities. We saw an adjusted EBITDA loss for the first quarter of $10.3 million compared to the $5.5 million loss in the prior year period. Turning now to our balance sheet. Cash, cash equivalents and investments as of March 31, 2022, were $586 million. We believe this gives us sufficient cash reserves to get to profitability without needing to raise additional funds given our current road map. With this substantial cash position, the company's operations should be well positioned to deal with the ups and downs of market generation, energy prices, interest rates and so on. Now turning to our second quarter outlook. Given that we are still at the beginning of our commercialization phase, I want to reiterate my comments from our last earnings call that we expect bookings to continue to be lumpy for quite some time. Our projection for second quarter financial results reflect this lumpiness. In the second quarter, we expect revenue to be between $2.3 million and $2.5 million. We anticipate second quarter bookings of between $3 million and $5 million. We are excited to share that we are increasing our expectations of full year 2022 bookings from a range of $20 million to $24 million on our last earnings call, to a new range of $23 million to $27 million. And with that, operator, we would now like to open the line for questions.

Operator

operator
#5

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from David Williams of Benchmark.

David Williams

analyst
#6

Congrats on the progress.

Peter Chapman

executive
#7

Thank you.

David Williams

analyst
#8

Yes, so I wanted to touch, I guess, real quick, maybe, Peter. But as you kind of think about the backdrop of quantum computing and the demand trends and you think about your customer base, can you kind of help us parse out your customers in terms of those that are more commercial versus academic and research driven? How much of your revenue or how much of maybe your bookings are driven by beyond maybe the academic world?

Peter Chapman

executive
#9

Let's see, we have a wide kind of range of different customers. It's a good spread. Some of it, to be honest, comes from cloud companies, and we don't know exactly how customers are using it. So there's kind of a wild card there, if you will. Anecdotally, we see things out on the Internet where students are using the quantum computers to do their quantum homework. Professors are using the quantum computers, our quantum computers, to teach classes and make YouTube videos. And then you have companies, large, large companies that are doing early work on these and producing scientific papers. So it is kind of a mixture of all of them. I'm not sure that I even would be able, to be honest, to generate an exact kind of breakdown because we don't have full transparency into sometimes what the cloud companies -- what their users are -- we don't get their customer ID information.

David Williams

analyst
#10

Okay, that's helpful and makes sense. And then maybe there's been some discussion of just, I guess, the ability of quantum machines to perform simple calculations, if you will. Can you talk a little bit about maybe the importance of algorithmic structure, and why quantum machines are maybe not as useful in solving practical logical problems like your Casio calculator one?

Peter Chapman

executive
#11

It's a great question. So quantum computing is likely to solve certain differential equations. And at the same time, not designed for simple math. It's hard to kind of wrap your head around. Adding 1 + 1 isn't what quantum computers are designed for. If you want simple math, there's an app for that on your phone. Today, we're working on problems like general object recognition that looks to rival the best classical technology today. And I understand for everyone, trying to understand kind of this quantum stuff is hard. And so how is it you could solve differential equations and at the same time how can it be hard to do 1 + 1. We've never said that quantum computers are going to be good at everything. They're going to be very good, we believe, against a certain subset that happens to be commercially interesting going forward.

David Williams

analyst
#12

Very good. And then maybe just a little bit of color around the Aria. It's just coming online. Can you talk about the qubit capacity there of the system, how that compares and the magnitude of performance differential to the prior generations?

Peter Chapman

executive
#13

Yes. I'm going to switch this. Since we have Jungsang on the line here, I'll let him answer it since he's the expert.

Jungsang Kim

executive
#14

All right. Thank you for the question. Yes, Aria -- I think Aria is capable of being configured up to 32 qubits. We can load it with different numbers of qubits depending on the optimal configuration and what the application is. Currently, as we have guided, our performance metric of choice is algorithmic qubits. And we believe that operating -- currently it's being operated with 21 physical qubits because that achieves the optimal result in maximizing the algorithmic qubits, which means the customer can run the most complicated quantum circuits in this configuration. Did that answer your question?

David Williams

analyst
#15

It did. I certainly appreciate that. And then maybe just one last one, if I can, and maybe Tom, it's better for you. But I understand that the bookings are lumpy, but it looks like between this quarter and the guidance, you're right around that midpoint of your bookings for the year. Just kind of wondering how we should think about maybe the second half in terms of bookings, what those expectations are. And I know previously, Tom, you talked about maybe the fourth quarter being a little bit heavier, but just kind of how do we think about the bookings for the remainder of the year?

Thomas Kramer

executive
#16

So as with all technology, we expect the bookings to be backloaded. There's no good reason for it. It's just how people spend towards their budget. And we would -- of course, if we have the opportunity to finish the sale earlier, we will. And all of the people listening here on this call would be the first to know, of course. But as we said on the call, we are able to raise our guidance based on the signals we're getting from the market.

David Williams

analyst
#17

Best of luck on the quarter.

Peter Chapman

executive
#18

Thank you.

Thomas Kramer

executive
#19

Thank you.

Operator

operator
#20

Our next question is from Ruben Roy of WestPark Capital.

Ruben Roy

analyst
#21

I guess I want to start, Peter, if we could talk a little bit about the assumptions around the cumulative number of systems that you talked about getting up into the 30s by 2026. Maybe just spend a little bit of time on how you're thinking about those systems in terms of ytterbium versus barium systems. Can we get to commercialization with ytterbium? Or to your point, around error correction using barium qubits, do we need to start to see some of those types of systems come to market before we can get to real commercialization of revenue? That would be helpful. And then also, I guess, around that same topic, if you could just talk a little bit. You mentioned that you're working on optimizing manufacturing and system footprint, et cetera. How are you envisioning sort of the footprint of these systems once we get out to maybe '25, '26?Are these going to be smaller in form factor? I think at some point, you had mentioned that we might see some rack mountable systems out in the marketplace. So an update on that would be helpful.

Peter Chapman

executive
#22

Great question, Ruben. So I think it's true for any quantum computing company that the very first thing you do is you look to optimize the native gate fidelity because that's kind of is low-hanging fruit. And the other thing is it really determines what the overhead that you're going to have to do for error correction. So the more you can get that to be lower, then the better in terms of the number of physical qubits you'll have to consume. So we're -- on one hand, we're busily pushing in both ytterbium and in barium to get the lowest number we possibly can. And so -- and we've talked about how basically at ytterbium, we think that number, I think, roughly is 99.8%. And at barium it's 99.98%, so basically kind of almost another 9. And then after that, you have to start thinking at least a 9 in this case, we probably need to do error correction to bring in more fidelity. And that means we need more physical qubits to do there. So we're kind of pushing on the native at one time. And now what you're hearing from us is we're starting to also push on the number of physical qubits. We have been doing that in a sense that, for instance, we announced a new chip where the number of qubits was much higher. We will continue to do that, increasing the number of qubits on the process or the QPU itself. And now what you're hearing is that we're starting to start thinking about building more quantum computers so that we would have a pool of physical qubits so that we could start to do error correction. And a key kind of piece to that story is that as soon as you have multiple systems, you need the network to come together because you need to do entanglement from one QPU to another, which means that they have to be networked. This is true not just for IonQ, but I believe it's true for any technology. So now the question is we're starting to think about how can we manufacture more computers, more quantum computers. And now it's the natural time to sit down and say, let's work on shrinking them, let's start working more on reducing their costs in terms of their -- to manufacture. Those haven't been our primary focus really up to this point. And now going forward, it's -- we're standing up a separate team because that's what their sole focus is kind of going forward. And if it turns out that we can't make progress on, if you will, in terms of the risk factor of one or the other qubit species, it just means that error correction is coming sooner. And that isn't what we believe. We're gearing up really for the end game in the race to the finish here. So that's the reason we're getting started. And as we talked about in the last earnings call, we -- if we're starting to get interest from potential sales, well, we should start getting ready for that as well.

Ruben Roy

analyst
#23

Very helpful. Also, I wanted to ask about the Aria systems. You mentioned the second Aria system under construction. You also had the announcement around collaboration with Microsoft for the Aria. Are both of your Aria systems going to be available via the cloud? Or is one going to be available via IonQ cloud? I just would love some detail on how you're thinking about deploying those systems over the course of this year.

Peter Chapman

executive
#24

I'm not sure we've decided all the final details. But in general, what we try to do is to build 2 systems in the same class. That way, if there's one that's down for maintenance that you've got another one that you can make available. It's -- and you're adding 2x the capacity when they're both up and running.

Ruben Roy

analyst
#25

Right. Okay. Makes sense. And then just a quick follow-up question for Thomas. You mentioned the growth in the sales team. Can you give us an update of where you are in terms of how you were thinking about sales headcount for the year? How much further you think you're going to go this year, and maybe update around any other sort of near-term headcount additions that you need to make around R&D or otherwise?

Peter Chapman

executive
#26

Yes. As we kind of talked about, we started off with a very small sales team last year. We've had a set of goal of the sales team this year, and I believe we hit that in the first quarter or pretty darn close to it. In terms of the number of people, we wanted to get them onboard early, obviously, because there's no point in getting salespeople on. At the end of the year, it's going to help your sales number. So we set an aggressive goal on kind of putting the team together. So they're busily working on sales now. And I would expect that the sales effort will continue to grow. There's lots of greenfield in terms of opportunity, both domestically and also internationally.

Operator

operator
#27

Our next question is from Richard Shannon of Craig-Hallum.

Richard Shannon

analyst
#28

Great. Just want to follow up on a couple of questions here or topics today and brought up in the past year, specifically regarding customers interested in buying a system. I guess 2 angles to look at this. First of all, what is -- is there real demand here for private companies buying a quantum computer in the near term? And would those customers be using it just for themselves or potentially sharing it with a small group because it seems like 8-figure kind of a purchase might be a little bit heavy for most organizations in a financial year. Or is this something that's mostly a government kind of a sale here, at least in the near term?

Peter Chapman

executive
#29

You can put it on your credit card. So the -- more seriously, it's -- I would say there's -- right now, what we're seeing is a lot of demand and interest there. Many times, it's for an area or a group or an organization that's looking to get it for kind of a group of end users, sometimes with -- let's just say, it could be in a university setting or in an international or national setting or government. So it's kind of in those context.

Richard Shannon

analyst
#30

Okay, that's fair enough. Second question I had was on your new Forte system. I guess I wanted to -- I think you described this as a ytterbium-based system. Is that correct, Peter?

Peter Chapman

executive
#31

That's correct, yes.

Richard Shannon

analyst
#32

Okay. So are there any advancements in the system here that are translatable or usable in the future barium systems? And do you expect to have and continue to develop next-generation versions of ytterbium?

Peter Chapman

executive
#33

I'm going to switch that to Jungsang since we have the expert online.

Jungsang Kim

executive
#34

All right. Thank you for the question. Yes, these systems actually take a while to build. So we actually have been planning and developing the systems for quite some time, obviously. And I think we -- at this point, we have -- this Forte actually includes a few new features. One of them is the way that we address this individual ions to run larger gates, the beams are actually steerable. I think Peter mentioned about that in one of the conferences at the end of last year, we have that technology. And those technologies and approaches actually scale -- translate very easily into other atomic species or other qubit species like barium. So certainly, many, many of these architectural features and the underlying technologies are definitely aligned to all of our future systems, whether they are ytterbium or barium. So at this point, we are very, very confident with our ytterbium technology. We can make -- we continue to make higher-performing quantum computers with them, and we believe that trend will continue with Forte. But I think we're also making a lot of background understanding so we can actually transition with barium. We are finding out, some of our early measurements, that barium systems do give us a lot more room in terms of higher performance systems. So that type of R&D is going to continue into the future.

Richard Shannon

analyst
#35

My last question is a follow-on from an earlier question today or just coming off of that, which is understanding your customer set here. And Peter, you mentioned that some of your customers come through the cloud, you don't have -- no identity, it's hard to kind of profile that. Is that suggesting that cloud is actually a significant portion of that? I guess my assumption was that most of those were coming from certain contracted customers, a relatively small amount from cloud. So can you clarify that for us, please?

Peter Chapman

executive
#36

We expect the cloud to be an important part of kind of the quantum ecosystem going forward. It offers an easy way for customers to sign up and give it a try. Anyone on the call with a credit card, you could be up and running on one of our quantum computers pretty easily. So in essence, it's particularly important. But the cloud is a -- it's a commoditized market. It's intended to give you deeply access to hardware. And quantum isn't at that place yet. We're not -- we're at the early stages of the TV market, not the end. So it hasn't been commoditized. So one would expect that in -- with kind of limited supply that it would make more sense to kind of have other business models that is not as favorable in terms of, say, the cloud. So we think that the cloud stuff is very important. We're very happy that we've kind of democratized access to these early quantum computers so everyone can get access to it and give it a try. But at the same time, I think it will be a while before the cloud market is the market, if you will, for quantum.

Operator

operator
#37

Our next question is from Scott Fessler of Morgan Stanley.

Scott Fessler

analyst
#38

When you guys announced Aria, you named a couple of new large customers that were already trialing. With the beta for Forte launching later this year, do you anticipate that new customers will headline these trials? Or will it largely be demo-ed by the same customers that are already on existing systems?

Peter Chapman

executive
#39

No, we very much do. So it is -- we have -- usually, when we release a new piece of hardware, the first people that get a crack at it is the internal applications team, as you can imagine, and they are often working with customers. And so -- and they might get access to -- very early to the system, maybe there might be bugs. With that early access, it's always not perfectly smooth. But that's -- customers want the kind of latest and greatest. And so that's kind of part of the deal, so. And they are likely to be the first ones to write papers or make announcements or something as a result.

Scott Fessler

analyst
#40

Okay. Just a follow-up there then on a slightly different topic. So as far as -- for Thomas, for the growth in -- or upping the yearly guidance for total contract bookings, if you roughly split the customer set into like 3 broad categories between government, academic and commercial, where do you see the greatest growth coming that gives you conviction in taking up the contract bookings estimates?

Thomas Kramer

executive
#41

So we actually see a lot of inbound interest. And what we don't know is who is going to break first. What we're presenting is a weighted view of our sales funnel. And together, they form our forecast. So I can't tell you which one it is because at our early stage of commercialization, I mean, every sale is binary, it happens or it doesn't. And so I don't know. But I will also say, as we stated before, we do not intend to break up segments just yet. I think we're too young a company to do that.

Peter Chapman

executive
#42

And you'd have to give us a little more time to have enough data to be able to draw an appropriate trend line.

Operator

operator
#43

Our last question is from Quinn Bolton of Needham & Company.

Quinn Bolton

analyst
#44

Just want to say congratulations on the progress to date. I had a few questions. First on Forte, does Forte use the same quantum processor that Aria does, so it's a 32 physical qubit system? And a related question due to steerable laser beams or the steerable laser system, does that end up giving you better gate fidelity? Does it give you faster gate speed as a result of the different systems?

Jungsang Kim

executive
#45

Yes, this is Jungsang. Yes, I think that's a great question. So the first question is to -- we are -- we've actually been on a trend to make sure that our quantum computers become more software configurable, meaning we don't -- we like to eventually get to a point where the number of qubits is really not tied to any of the hardware, underlying hardware components in the system. So IonQ Forte takes a big step in that direction, in the sense that in the previous systems, we had 32 fixed beams, and that's what limits the number of maximum qubits to 32. But with this steering system, we actually have that very much on the software control. So at this point, the Forte can actually -- the control system we have in Forte can actually address more than 40 cubits. Although there are other reasons why we're actually not exactly operating at those levels yet. But these are kind of technological pieces we're putting together so that in the future, our quantum computers will become much more scalable and not necessarily tied, the qubit numbers are not necessarily tied to the hardware, so. And then the second -- the answer to your second question is, yes, indeed, it turns out that using this beam steering approach, we can actually make the laser beam that addresses the ions to be much more stable and actually be less susceptible to some fluctuations in the system. So indeed, we're seeing that our gate fidelities are getting better. And I think we can also deliver more power to the system. So I think we have a lot of room to continue to improve the gate speed and the systems as well.

Quinn Bolton

analyst
#46

Second question was just on now that you've announced sort of Forte and sort of beta availability second half of this year with broader availability next year. I think Peter, in the past, you've sort of said that the public cloud systems may be sort of the generation minus 1. And so as Forte becomes public or becomes available, do you expect Aria to sort of come to the cloud sort of second half of this year once Forte is available to public -- sorry, private beta customers?

Peter Chapman

executive
#47

Yes, no, I think you're seeing what I said in action, if you will. Aria is just coming to the cloud. And at the same time, we're announcing the current generation. And we haven't announced that, that would go to the cloud yet.

Quinn Bolton

analyst
#48

But there must be -- go ahead.

Peter Chapman

executive
#49

Yes, no, it kind of is following that trend.

Quinn Bolton

analyst
#50

Got it. And then just lastly for Thomas. I'm wondering if you might be willing to sort of give us -- on the revenue forecast of $10.2 million to $10.7 million this year that you're reiterating. Can you give us some sense of what you would think the EBITDA loss might be at that revenue level? Just trying to get a sense of what you expect OpEx might look like over the balance of the year.

Thomas Kramer

executive
#51

So I think that we shouldn't expect huge variations on that front because when we do -- when we increase bookings towards the end of the year or in the second half, there will be less impact on the rev rec line, which is what flows down to EBITDA.

Quinn Bolton

analyst
#52

But I mean, I think you did $10.3 million of adjusted EBITDA loss in Q1. Do you think something in the $40 million to $50 million EBITDA loss is the right level to be thinking about based on the $10.2 million to $10.7 million revenue? I assume that OpEx probably has some upward bias over the course of the year.

Thomas Kramer

executive
#53

We're holding firm at our previously stated EBITDA loss of $55 million. So it will not -- it should not increase the loss because even if we have to build these things as well, of course.

Operator

operator
#54

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. And I would like to turn the call back to Peter Chapman for closing remarks.

Peter Chapman

executive
#55

Well, thank you all for joining our Q1 2022 earnings call and for all your thoughtful questions. We'd like -- I'd like to also thank the entire IonQ team for all their hard work that has brought us to this point, to new heights for this quarter, and we look forward to seeing everyone in the Q2 earnings call next quarter. So thank you again for joining, and have a great evening.

Operator

operator
#56

This concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.

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